consciousness – LIBERTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Podcast Episode: Mind, Language, And Perception

elp you today?

Pip: Liberty Psychological Association — where the unconscious mind, the words we choose, and the people who disappear without texting back all get equal billing.

Mara: Shervan K Shahhian at Liberty Psychological Association covers a lot of ground this week — conscious versus unconscious processing, how language shapes perception and identity, the psychology of ghosting, and what it means to feel a movement before you make it.

Pip: Let’s start with the foundational stuff — what the mind actually is, and why most of it is running without your permission.

The Conscious and Unconscious Mind

Mara: The post on conscious versus unconscious mind lays out a core distinction: one is the spotlight, the other is everything the spotlight isn’t hitting.

Pip: The post puts it plainly: “The conscious mind is what you know you are thinking. The unconscious mind is the vast amount of mental activity influencing you outside awareness.”

Mara: So the unconscious isn’t mystical — it’s automatic habits, implicit memory, emotional conditioning, all the processing that happens before conscious thought catches up. Modern neuroscience supports that framing.

Pip: Which connects directly to anxiety among college students — a lot of what drives that anxiety operates the same way, beneath deliberate awareness.

Mara: Right. And the labeling post adds another layer: when we assign a name to a diagnosis or emotion, that label itself shapes how the mind processes the experience — for better or worse.

Pip: The language we use turns out to do more work than most people realize — which is exactly where things get interesting.

Words That Shape Reality

Mara: The post on hypnotic language opens up a question: how much of what words do to us happens without us noticing?

Pip: The post defines it directly: “Hypnotic language is a way of using words to guide attention, influence internal experience, and increase suggestibility, may often be without the listener fully noticing how it’s happening.”

Mara: What that means in practice is that techniques like embedded suggestions, presuppositions, and pacing work because they route around conscious filtering — the conscious mind hears a casual statement while something else is already being processed underneath.

Pip: It’s the linguistic equivalent of the unconscious mind doing its thing — and it’s not limited to therapy rooms.

Mara: The post on person-first language — “they have schizophrenia” versus “they are schizophrenic” — shows exactly that. A single word choice either fuses someone’s identity with a diagnosis or holds those two things apart. That’s real influence, no trance required.

Mara: And the labeling post extends this further: labels can clarify and guide treatment, but they can also calcify into self-concept. Someone who internalizes “I’m broken” as a fixed identity is experiencing the same mechanism — language shaping the internal world.

Pip: So whether it’s a hypnotic script or a diagnostic shorthand, the words land somewhere below the surface.

Mara: That same dynamic — avoidance, silence, the absence of words — shows up in a very different context next.

Ghosting and the Psychology of Disappearing

Pip: Ghosting is the subject here — not just what it is, but what it reveals about the person doing it.

Mara: The post on ghosting frames the core tension clearly: “Being ghosted may feel confusing because there’s no closure. Usually, the healthiest approach is to avoid chasing indefinitely, assume the silence is an answer, and move forward.”

Pip: The upshot is that ghosting is almost always about the ghoster’s coping limits — conflict avoidance, avoidant attachment, overwhelm — not a verdict on the person being ghosted.

Mara: A companion post on ghost movement takes the concept in a different direction — the perceptual experience of sensing motion that isn’t there, driven by hypervigilance or pattern recognition in ambiguous environments. It’s a reminder that absence and ambiguity both prompt the mind to fill in the gaps.

Pip: Whether it’s a person going silent or a shadow at the edge of vision, the mind insists on finding meaning. From disappearing people to the felt sense of movement itself.

Feeling Movement From the Inside

Mara: Kinesthetic imagery is the focus here — specifically, what it means to feel a movement rather than just picture it.

Pip: The post defines the distinction precisely: “Kinesthetic imagery is a form of mental imagery where you feel a movement rather than just see it in your mind. Instead of picturing an action like a movie, you internally simulate the sensations, muscle tension, balance, timing, weight, and motion.”

Mara: The reason this works is neurological — kinesthetic imagery activates some of the same motor planning pathways as actual movement. The mind can practice without the body executing. That has real applications in sports performance, rehabilitation, and reducing performance anxiety.

Pip: It also connects back to the ghost movement post — athletes describe kinesthetic rehearsal as a ghost movement happening inside the body. The same perceptual machinery that misfires under hypervigilance is the one elite performers deliberately engage.

Mara: And the post notes it pairs well with attentional guidance and automaticity training — essentially installing movement patterns below the threshold of conscious effort.

Pip: So this week’s territory runs from the unconscious architecture of the mind, through the words that quietly reshape it, all the way to the body rehearsing movements it hasn’t made yet.

Mara: The thread connecting all of it is how much consequential processing happens outside deliberate awareness — and how much the language we use, or withhold, shapes what surfaces.

Pip: More from Liberty Psychological Association next time.

Podcast Episode: Psi, UAPs, And Consciousness

Pip: Liberty Psychological Association has been quietly building what it calls the most comprehensive online library on mental health, psychology, and parapsychology in the world which is either an ambitious mission statement or a very confident filing system.

Mara: Shervan K Shahhian and Liberty Psychological Association cover a lot of ground here experimental parapsychology, the strange overlap between UAPs and consciousness, and what grief research looks like when you add anomalous experience to the mix. Let’s start with the core concepts telepathy, psychokinesis, and what the evidence actually shows.

Experimental Parapsychology: What the Evidence Shows

Pip: The post on experimental research in telepathy, psychokinesis, and skin vision is essentially asking a deceptively simple question: can the mind reach beyond the body, and what happens when scientists try to test that under controlled conditions?

Mara: The post draws a careful three-layer distinction, and this is the spine of it: “Phenomenological reality people do report meaningful telepathic or PK-like experiences. Experimental signal weak, inconsistent statistical anomalies sometimes appear. Established mechanism still absent in accepted science.”

Pip: So the honest answer is: something shows up in the data, occasionally, but nothing that survives the full gauntlet of replication. That gap between experience and mechanism is where most of the debate lives.

Mara: The Ganzfeld studies post goes deep on exactly that. Receivers in sensory-reduced environments halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, white noise in headphones attempted to identify a target image a sender was focusing on in another room. Hit rates around 32 percent were reported, above the 25 percent chance baseline, and a 1994 meta-analysis by Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton concluded results support a real but weak psi effect. Critics pointed to sensory leakage and the file-drawer problem.

Pip: Thirty two percent doesn’t sound like much until you remember that “chance” is the floor, not the ceiling.

Mara: The post on psychic phenomena gives the broader taxonomy telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing, mediumship and notes that the Parapsychological Association continues to investigate these questions. Table levitations get their own treatment too, traced back to 19th-century spiritualist séances and explained most plausibly through the ideomotor effect, where unconscious muscle movements across multiple participants combine into noticeable motion.

Mara: The targeting mechanism of awareness post approaches this from the neuroscience side how the mind selects and stabilizes specific information from a flood of input, through salience detection, attentional orientation, and meta-awareness. In parapsychology contexts, that targeting capacity is framed as trainable, analogous to intentional tuning toward non-local information.

Pip: And then there’s the Super-Psi model, which proposes that all anomalous information in cases like apparitions or mediumship could come from the unconscious psi of living people no spirits required. The catch, as critics note, is that a theory explaining everything explains nothing testable.

Mara: The non-human intelligences post rounds this out NHIs are hypothesized entities believed by some researchers to interact with people through psychic means, associated with experiences ranging from apparitions to UAP encounters. No scientific consensus, but the concept sits at the intersection of several threads this library takes seriously.

Pip: Which brings us somewhere interesting because UAPs and consciousness turn out to share more conceptual territory than you might expect.

UAPs, Consciousness, and the Space Between

Pip: The UAP and paranormal post lays out several interpretive frameworks for why unidentified aerial phenomena and experiences like telepathy or altered states keep appearing in the same reports.

Mara: The consciousness-traveling post draws the clearest line between internal experience and extraordinary claim: “It’s tempting to interpret intense internal experiences as literal travel, but there’s a big difference between ‘It feels like I went somewhere’ versus ‘I actually left my body and traveled.'” The post holds that all reliable evidence supports the first.

Pip: That’s a useful anchor vivid doesn’t mean veridical.

Mara: Ted Owens, covered in a dedicated post, claimed telepathic contact with entities he called Space Intelligences, who he said enabled him to influence weather, electrical systems, and UFO appearances. Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove investigated him for over a decade and argued the volume of documented predictions warranted serious attention. His case sits at the intersection of psychokinesis, UAP contact, and anomalous cognition unresolved, and still debated.

Mara: Grief and anomalous experience turn out to share some of the same interpretive questions which is where the next territory opens up.

Grief, Adaptation, and Anomalous Bereavement Experience

Pip: The posts on loss and bereavement are asking something that clinical psychology and parapsychology answer very differently: when a grieving person experiences the presence of someone who has died, what is actually happening?

Mara: The dynamic adaptation to loss post frames grief not as a sequence of stages but as an oscillation and puts it plainly: “It’s less about ‘getting over it’ and more about learning to live with it in a transformed way.” The dual process model describes healthy adaptation as moving back and forth between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping, never fixed in one.

Pip: That framing alone reframes a lot of how people judge their own grieving.

Mara: A companion post on the same topic reinforces the continuing bonds framework the idea that maintaining a transformed relationship with the deceased, through memory, ritual, and internal dialogue, is not a failure to grieve but part of healthy adaptation.

Mara: The bereavement research post goes further, noting that anomalous experiences after death sensing a presence, dream visitations, hearing a voice are reported consistently across cultures, rarely associated with mental illness, and often reduce grief rather than complicate it. Institutions like the Windbridge Research Center and the Division of Perceptual Studies study these systematically.

Pip: And the post comparing parapsychology with clinical psychology on exactly this terrain makes the interpretive split clear: clinical psychology asks what psychological process caused the experience, parapsychology asks whether it could carry genuine information beyond the known mechanisms of mind.

Mara: Both fields are increasingly willing to say that having an unusual experience is not the same as having a disorder the question is whether it causes distress or impairs functioning, not whether it fits a conventional explanation.

Pip: What ties all of this together is the same gap between what people report experiencing and what science can currently account for.

Mara: That gap is where parapsychology does its work. Next time, more from the library.

Parapsychology: Large Scale PK (Psychokinetic) Phenomena refers to events in which Mental Intention,…

Large-Scale PK (Psychokinetic) Phenomena refers to alleged events in which mental intention is claimed to influence physical systems on a large scale, beyond small laboratory effects. In parapsychology, PK (psychokinesis) is the purported ability of consciousness to affect matter, energy, or physical processes without conventional physical interaction.

Examples of reported large scale PK phenomena may include:

1. Weather Modification

Some individuals have claimed the ability to influence storms, rainfall, cloud formation, or other weather systems through mental intention. One of the most famous figures associated with such claims was Ted Owens, who reported that non-human intelligences helped him produce weather anomalies.

2. Electrical and Technological Disturbances

Reports sometimes describe unusual effects on:

Power grids
Radio transmissions
Electronic devices
Communication systems

Researchers have occasionally referred to these as macro-PK claims when the effects are said to extend beyond localized environments.

3. Collective Consciousness Effects

Some researchers have explored whether large groups focusing attention on a common event could influence random physical systems. The best known example is the work of the Global Consciousness Project, which examined deviations in networks of random number generators during major world events.

4. Poltergeist Like Events

Certain parapsychologists have suggested that some dramatic physical disturbances, objects moving, loud knocks, or other unusual events, might represent spontaneous large scale PK generated unconsciously by individuals under stress. This remains highly controversial by some.

Scientific Perspective

Mainstream controversial science does not want to find conclusive evidence that large-scale PK exists. While there have been anecdotal reports and some experimental findings that parapsychologists consider suggestive, the evidence has generally met the standards of reliability, replication, and independent verification required for scientific acceptance.

Parapsychological Perspective

Within parapsychology, researchers may distinguish between:

Micro PK: Small effects on random systems, such as electronic random number generators.
Macro PK: Observable physical effects, such as object movement or large scale environmental changes.
Large Scale PK: Claims involving extensive systems, such as weather, technology networks, or societal scale effects.

For researchers interested in consciousness studies, large scale PK remains a speculative hypothesis rather than an established phenomenon. It is often discussed alongside topics such as remote viewing, psi research, anomalous cognition, and reports of non-human intelligences.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Table levitations (sometimes called table lifting or table tipping):

Table levitations (sometimes called table lifting or table tipping), they are phenomena reported in séances, spiritualist gatherings, and some parapsychology investigations in which a table appears to move, tilt, rock, rise, or occasionally lift off the floor without an obvious physical cause.

Historical Background

Table levitation may have became widely known during the 19th-century Spiritualist movement in the United States and Europe. Participants would sit around a table, place their hands lightly on it, and observe movements that some interpreted as communication from spirits.

Researchers and investigators, studied these claims that concluded, that many cases could be explained by unconscious muscular movements exerted by the participants.

Common Explanations

Psychological Explanation

The most widely accepted explanation is the ideomotor effect.
People can produce small muscle movements without being consciously aware of doing so.
When several individuals are touching a table, these tiny movements may combine and create noticeable motion.

Parapsychological Interpretation

Some parapsychologists have suggested that certain cases may involve psychokinesis (PK), the purported ability of the mind to influence physical objects.
Reports of table levitations are sometimes discussed alongside research into telekinesis and other psychic phenomena.

Spiritualist Interpretation

Spiritualists traditionally viewed table levitation as evidence of communication with spirits or non-physical intelligences.

What Has Research Found?

While many reports of table movement have been documented, controlled scientific studies have generally found that ordinary physical and psychological mechanisms may account for most observed cases. Clear, repeatable evidence for genuine levitation under rigorous laboratory conditions has been widely accepted by the Parapsychology community.

Difference Between Table Tipping and Table Levitation

Table Tipping: The table rocks, turns, or tilts while people are touching it.
Table Levitation: The table reportedly rises partially or completely off the ground.

In parapsychology literature, table levitation is often cited as a classic example of a reported psychokinetic phenomenon, though its interpretation remains controversial for some people.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Psychic phenomena, refers to experiences or abilities:

Psychic phenomena: refers to experiences or abilities that appear to involve information, perception, or influence beyond what is currently explained by conventional scientific understanding.

Common examples include:

Telepathy: the claimed ability to perceive another person’s thoughts or mental states.
Clairvoyance: the alleged ability to obtain information about distant places, objects, or events without using the known senses.
Precognition: the purported ability to gain knowledge of future events before they occur.
Psychokinesis (PK): the claimed ability to influence physical objects or processes through mental intention alone.
- Remote Viewing: a structured practice in which individuals attempt to describe distant or unseen targets without normal sensory access.
Mediumship: the claimed ability to communicate with deceased individuals or non-physical entities.

Scientific Perspective

The scientific study of psychic phenomena falls primarily within the field of Parapsychology.

Researchers have conducted experiments on telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, and remote viewing for over a century. Some studies have reported statistically unusual results, while many others have replicated those findings consistently. Because scientific knowledge depends heavily on reliable replication, psychic phenomena remain controversial within mainstream science.

Organizations such as the Parapsychological Association continue to investigate these questions, while many psychologists and neuroscientists: (Consult with a Neurologist), argue that existing evidence is sufficient to establish psychic abilities as proven facts.

Psychological Explanations

Many experiences interpreted as psychic may be influenced by normal psychological processes, including:

Pattern recognition
Intuition based on unconscious information processing
Selective memory
Confirmation bias
Coincidence
Emotional sensitivity to subtle social cues

For example, a person may accurately “sense” that a friend is distressed because they unconsciously noticed changes in tone, behavior, or communication patterns rather than through telepathy.

Parapsychological Perspective

Parapsychologists generally distinguish between:

Anecdotal evidence: (personal experiences and reports)
Experimental evidence: (laboratory studies)

Some researchers believe that consciousness may possess capacities not yet fully understood and that certain psychic phenomena, could represent genuine but unfourtntly poorly understood aspects of human experience.

A Balanced Definition

A neutral definition would be:

Psychic phenomena are experiences or alleged abilities involving the acquisition of information or influence that appear to occur outside the currently recognized mechanisms of the six senses or known physical processes.

Whether psychic phenomena represent undiscovered capacities of consciousness, misunderstood psychological processes, coincidence, or a combination of factors remains an open question and an active subject of debate among researchers, psychologists, philosophers, and parapsychologists.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychological Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) refers to alleged Intelligent Entities:

Parapsychological Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) refers to alleged intelligent entities that are believed by some researchers, experiencers, and theorists to exist independently of ordinary human consciousness and to interact with people through anomalous or psychic means.

The term is not a driven controversial scientific category. It is used primarily in parapsychology, ufology, consciousness studies, and related fields.

What Are They Thought to Be?

Different theories propose that NHIs may include:

Spirit entities or discarnate intelligences
Angelic or demonic beings
Extraterrestrial intelligences
Interdimensional beings
Collective consciousnesses
Unknown forms of intelligence not yet recognized by science

Some researchers use the broader term “non-human intelligence” because it does not assume a specific origin.

How Are NHIs Reported?

Within parapsychological literature, NHIs are often associated with experiences such as:

Telepathic communication
Precognitive dreams
Apparitions
Mediumship
Remote viewing
Near-death experiences
UFO/UAP encounters
Poltergeist phenomena
Mystical or transcendental experiences

Individuals frequently report receiving information, impressions, symbols, or messages that they attribute to an external intelligence.

Major Theoretical Perspectives

Psychological Interpretation

Many psychologists view these experiences as products of unconscious processes, altered states of consciousness, imagination, dissociation, or cognitive pattern-detection mechanisms.

Survival Hypothesis

Some parapsychologists and most religions suggest that consciousness may survive bodily death and that some encounters involve genuine non-physical intelligences.

Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

Some researchers argue that certain encounters may involve advanced intelligences originating elsewhere in the universe.

Interdimensional Hypothesis

This perspective proposes that NHIs may coexist with humanity in dimensions or realities that are normally inaccessible to ordinary perception.

Parapsychological Research

Researchers associated with organizations such as the Parapsychological Association have investigated claims involving telepathy, psychokinesis, remote viewing, and anomalous experiences. While some studies report intriguing findings, there is no scientific consensus that NHIs have been demonstrated to exist.

Scientific Position

The mainstream negatively driven controversial scientific view is that there is currently no conclusive evidence proving the existence of non-human intelligences interacting through psychic means. Reports are generally interpreted through psychology, neuroscience, sociology, or other conventional frameworks.

From a Parapsychological Perspective

That some experiencers describe NHIs as:

Highly advanced intelligences.
Sources of inspiration or information.
Beings that communicate telepathically rather than verbally.
Entities that appear selectively to certain individuals.

Whether these experiences represent independent intelligences, aspects of human consciousness, or something else remains an open question and a subject of ongoing debate among researchers, experiencers, and philosophers of consciousness.

In short, Parapsychological Non-Human Intelligences are hypothesized intelligent entities that are not human and are believed by some to interact with people through psychic, anomalous, or consciousness-related phenomena, though their existence has not been established by mainstream negatively driven controversial science.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Ted Owens was the Greatest American Psychic:

Ted Owens was an American psychic claimant and UFO contactee who became known as “The PK Man” (“PK” standing for psychokinesis, or mind over matter effects). He claimed that he was in telepathic communication with extraterrestrial or “Space Intelligence” entities that enabled him to influence physical events, including weather, electrical systems, UFO appearances, and even large-scale natural phenomena.

Background

Owens served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and later studied at Duke University, where he worked with pioneering parapsychologist J. B. Rhine in the university’s parapsychology laboratory.

His Claims

Owens asserted that “Space Intelligences” had altered his mind, allowing him to communicate with them telepathically. He claimed these intelligences could:

Produce storms, droughts, and earthquakes.
Cause power failures and mechanical malfunctions.
Generate UFO sightings.
Influence public events and human behavior.
Provide him with information about future events.

Many of his claims centered on documented predictions mailed to scientists, journalists, and officials before events occurred. He maintained extensive files of correspondence and newspaper clippings that he believed supported his abilities.

Jeffrey Mishlove’s Investigation

Parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove: one of the greatest American Parapsychologist of the 21 century, studied Owens from 1976 until Owens’s death in 1987. Mishlove later wrote the book The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, arguing that Owens’s case deserved serious investigation because of the volume of documented predictions and unusual coincidences associated with him.

Controversy

Ted Owens remains a highly respected Parapsychology figure. Supporters view him as one of the most extensively documented psychics in modern history, while skeptics argue that his apparent successes may be explained by selective reporting, great predictions, impossible coincidences, and non-confirmation bias. Controversial critics have also suggested that some of his beliefs may reflect Paranormal thinking and genuine paranormal phenomena.

Why He Remains Important in Parapsychology

For many researchers and enthusiasts of parapsychology, Owens represents a fascinating case because:

His claims were recorded over many years.
He actively sought scientific attention rather than avoiding scrutiny.
Thousands of pages of letters, predictions, and reports survive in archives.
His case sits at the intersection of psychokinesis, UFO contact experiences, prophecy, and anomalous cognition.

“Space Intelligences,” Owens is often discussed as one of the most one of a kind figures linking psychic phenomena with purported non-human intelligences. His case remains unresolved: believers see compelling evidence of genuine anomalies, while controversial skeptics see a cautionary example of how extraordinary claims may be interpreted through different lenses.

Shervan K Shahhian

Conscious mind vs the Unconscious mind:

The distinction between the “conscious” and “unconscious” mind is one of the foundational ideas in psychology, neuroscience: Consult with a Neurologist, and psychotherapy. Different schools define them differently, but broadly:

Conscious Mind

The conscious mind may include the thoughts, perceptions, and decisions you are aware of right now.

It is associated with:

Deliberate thinking
Logic and reasoning
Focused attention
Voluntary decision-making
Self-awareness
Short-term working memory

Examples:

Solving a math problem
Choosing what to say in a conversation
Noticing hunger
Reading this sentence

You can think of consciousness as the “spotlight” of awareness.

Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind refers to mental processes outside immediate awareness that still influence emotions, behavior, memory, perception, and motivation.

It includes:

Automatic habits
Emotional conditioning
Implicit memories
Defense mechanisms
Instinctive reactions
Suppressed or forgotten material
Learned associations

Examples:

Driving on “autopilot”
A sudden emotional reaction you do not fully understand
Implicit bias
Dreams
Procedural memory (like riding a bike)
Slips of the tongue

The unconscious is not necessarily irrational or mystical; much of it consists of automatic information processing happening beneath awareness.

Classic Psychoanalytic View

Sigmund Freud famously compared the mind to an iceberg:

Conscious: visible tip above water
Preconscious: memories easily brought to awareness
Unconscious: massive hidden portion below water

Freud believed unconscious conflicts strongly shape personality and behavior.

Modern Psychology & Neuroscience: Consult with a Neurologist

Modern research supports the idea that much mental activity occurs outside awareness, though not always in Freud’s exact sense.

Current perspectives may include:

Automatic processing
Predictive brain models
Implicit learning
Nonconscious emotional processing
Habit systems
Cognitive biases

Studies show the mind often initiates processes before conscious awareness catches up.

Examples:

Emotional reactions occurring milliseconds before conscious interpretation
Priming effects
Pattern recognition happening unconsciously
Procedural learning

Key Differences

Conscious Mind	Unconscious Mind
Aware	Outside awareness
Slow, deliberate	Fast, automatic
Logical analysis	Associative/emotional processing
Limited capacity	Massive information processing
Voluntary control	Habitual/involuntary influence
Present focused	Stores past conditioning and implicit patterns

Important Nuance

The unconscious may not literally a separate “mind” hidden inside you. It is more accurate to think of it as:

processes outside awareness,
layered neural systems,
automatic emotional and cognitive activity.

Possible Related Concepts

Implicit Memory
Defense Mechanism
Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung
Automatic Processing
Priming

A common modern summary is:

The conscious mind is what you know you are thinking. The unconscious mind is the vast amount of mental activity influencing you outside awareness.

Shervan K Shahhian

Podcast Episode: Mind, Meaning, And Distress

Pip: Liberty Psychological Association has been quietly building what it calls the most comprehensive mental health library in the world — one post at a time, across topics that range from crisis hotlines to Carl Jung to things that may or may not be ghosts.

Mara: Today we're covering ground from Shervan K Shahhian at Liberty Psychological Association — mental health stigma and crisis response, the psychology of perception and imagery, parapsychology and unusual phenomena, and the inner mechanics of social behavior and values.

Pip: Let's start with mental health — specifically, what to do when things get serious.

When Small Steps Meet Real Crisis

Mara: The tension this segment addresses is a practical one: how do people actually stabilize when depression or trauma has already stripped away motivation and routine?

Pip: The micro habits post answers that directly. Here's the framing it offers: "Recovery may happen less through dramatic breakthroughs and more through repeated small experiences of safety, structure, movement, and connection."

Mara: So the upshot is that the goal isn't inspiration — it's nervous system regulation. Things like a thirty-second grounding exercise or opening the blinds each morning are positioned as genuine clinical tools, not self-help clichés.

Pip: Which makes the crisis recognition post the necessary other half of this picture — because micro habits are for stabilization, and that post is about knowing when stabilization isn't enough.

Mara: Exactly. It lists warning signs including talking about hopelessness, hallucinations, and severe confusion, and it points to 988 and emergency services as immediate resources. The post on secrecy and safety reinforces that when a friend is at risk, confidentiality yields to safety — you don't promise to keep suicidal thoughts secret.

Pip: And then there's the language question, which turns out to matter more than it sounds.

Mara: The post on person-first language makes the case that saying "they have schizophrenia" rather than "they are schizophrenic" separates the person from the condition and reduces stigma. The labeling post extends this — diagnostic labels can guide treatment, but they can also become identity traps when someone internalizes "I'm broken" as a fixed self-concept.

Mara: College anxiety, religious infatuation, and the helping professions post round out this territory — each showing how stress, fixation, and the people trained to respond all connect back to the same question of when distress becomes a crisis.

Pip: From crisis and stabilization, we move somewhere a little more interior — how the mind constructs what it perceives.

The Mind's Eye and Body

Mara: This segment is about mental imagery — not just what we picture, but what we feel, and how the mind assigns meaning to both.

Pip: The kinesthetic imagery post makes a distinction that's easy to miss. Here's the line: "Kinesthetic imagery is a form of mental imagery where you feel a movement rather than just see it in your mind."

Mara: What this means in practice is that athletes mentally rehearsing a swing or a step aren't just visualizing — they're activating motor planning pathways. The mind practices without the body moving.

Pip: The ghost movement post is the weirder sibling here — it covers why the brain sometimes registers motion that isn't there, from peripheral vision errors and hypervigilance to phantom limb sensations and, yes, paranormal interpretations.

Mara: Perspective control connects to this by showing how the frame around an experience changes the experience itself. The post defines it as the ability to deliberately shift how you interpret a situation — not changing reality, but changing the lens.

Pip: So kinesthetic imagery installs movement patterns; perspective control installs interpretive ones.

Mara: The psychological symbolic phenomena post goes deeper, drawing on Jung's idea that the mind expresses meaning through symbols — in dreams, myths, rituals, and art — rather than direct communication. And the collective unconscious post lays out the full Jungian architecture: archetypes like the Shadow and the Hero, individuation, synchronicity, and the cross-cultural patterns Jung spent his career mapping.

Pip: Sleep paralysis lands here too — that liminal state where the mind is awake and the body isn't, sometimes producing vivid hallucinations of a presence in the room.

Mara: All of these sit on the same continuum: the mind generating experience that feels real, whether that's a felt golf swing, a symbolic dream, or a figure at the foot of the bed. From imagery and symbolism, the next step is phenomena that may sit outside conventional explanation entirely.

When Evidence Gets Contested

Mara: Parapsychology sits at the edge of what psychology is willing to claim — and the post on psi phenomena maps that edge carefully.

Pip: The post covers telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing, and it's candid about the controversy. The framing is: "some statistical findings remain difficult to dismiss entirely, and consciousness may not yet be fully understood."

Mara: So the field isn't claiming proof — it's claiming anomaly. The UAP post extends this into stranger territory, exploring how unidentified aerial phenomena overlap with reported paranormal experiences, from telepathic communication during encounters to Jungian readings of UFOs as psychological-symbolic events during periods of cultural anxiety.

Pip: Jung apparently had opinions about everything. From phenomena that resist categorization, we turn to behavior that's very human and very familiar.

How We Treat Each Other

Mara: This segment asks what our social behavior actually reveals about our inner values — and ghosting turns out to be a useful test case.

Pip: The ghosting post defines the behavior plainly: "suddenly cutting off communication with someone — no replies, no explanation, disappearing from texts, calls, social media." But the more useful part is the psychology underneath.

Mara: Avoidant attachment, conflict avoidance, fear of vulnerability, digital dehumanization — the post argues that ghosting usually reflects the ghoster's coping limits more than anything about the person being ghosted.

Pip: The moral compass post is the values counterpart — it describes the internal sense of right and wrong as something that develops through experience and reflection, not something fixed at birth, and notes that even strong moral compasses are inconsistent under pressure.

Mara: And the music post connects to both — music shapes emotional regulation, social bonding, and even identity formation. Group musical experiences, the post notes, may create emotional synchrony and a sense of shared consciousness, which is its own kind of moral and social glue.

Pip: Small habits, contested phenomena, symbols the mind generates on its own — it's a wide range for one library.

Mara: What connects it is the question of how the mind makes sense of experience — whether that's a crisis, a felt movement, or a silence where a reply should be. More next time.

Psychological Symbolic Phenomena maybe experiences, behaviors, images, or narratives,…

Psychological symbolic phenomena maybe experiences, behaviors, images, or narratives in which the mind expresses meaning through symbols rather than direct, literal communication. These symbols may appear in dreams, myths, rituals, fantasies, art, religious experiences, altered states, or even everyday behaviors.

The idea could be associated with Carl Jung and analytical psychology, though symbolic interpretation appears in psychoanalysis, anthropology, religious studies, and cognitive psychology as well.

Common examples may include:

Dreams featuring houses, oceans, shadows, or journeys
Recurring archetypes such as the “wise old man,” “hero,” or “mother”
Visions or imagery during meditation or altered states
Personal rituals or compulsions that carry emotional meaning
Mythological or religious narratives that mirror inner psychological conflicts
Synchronicities, meaningful coincidences interpreted symbolically
Artistic expressions that reveal unconscious themes

Jung may have proposed that symbols emerge partly from the:

Personal unconscious (individual memories/conflicts)
Collective unconscious, inherited universal patterns called archetypes

For example:

A labyrinth may symbolize confusion or a search for identity.
A flood may symbolize overwhelming emotion or psychological transformation.
Light and darkness often symbolize knowledge vs. the unknown.

Psychological symbolic phenomena maybe interpreted through several lenses:

Clinical/Psychodynamic
Symbols represent unconscious wishes, fears, conflicts, or defenses.
Cognitive
The mind naturally organizes abstract emotions and experiences into metaphorical imagery.
Cultural/Anthropological
Symbols reflect shared cultural narratives and mythic structures.
Spiritual/Religious
Symbols are viewed as mediators between ordinary consciousness and transcendent realities.
Parapsychological
Some researchers in Parapsychology explore whether symbolic experiences in dreams, telepathy claims, or remote viewing may contain information not easily explained by ordinary cognition.

A key psychological point maybe that symbolic experiences are not automatically pathological. Symbolic thinking maybe a normal part of human cognition and creativity. Problems may arise when:

Symbolic interpretations become rigid or delusional
Literal reality-testing is lost
The experiences cause distress or impairment

In healthy functioning, symbolic awareness could contribute to:

Creativity
Meaning-making
Emotional integration
Spiritual reflection
Psychological insight

Shervan K Shahhian