philosophy – LIBERTY PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

Parapsychology: Postmortem Survival refers to the hypothesis that,…

Postmortem Survival refers to the hypothesis that some aspect of human consciousness, personality, or awareness continues to exist after physical death. Researchers in this field attempt to investigate whether consciousness can survive the death of the mind.

This topic is primarily studied within the field of Parapsychology and by organizations such as Society for Psychical Research and Parapsychological Association.

Major Areas of Research

Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)

NDEs occur when people report vivid experiences during life threatening situations or periods of clinical death.

Common features include:

Out of body experiences

Traveling through a tunnel

Encounters with deceased relatives

Feelings of peace and love

Life reviews

Interpretations:

Survivalists see NDEs as evidence that consciousness can exist apart from the mind.

Skeptics suggest neurological: Consult with a Neurologist, psychological, or physiological explanations.

After-Death Communications (ADCs)

ADCs are experiences in which bereaved individuals report sensing contact from deceased loved ones.

Examples include:

Hearing a loved one’s voice

Feeling their presence

Vivid dreams

Seeing apparitions

Receiving meaningful signs

Researchers often note that ADCs are relatively common and frequently comforting to those who experience them.

Deathbed Visions

Some dying individuals report seeing deceased relatives, spiritual beings, or unfamiliar landscapes shortly before death.

Questions studied include:

Are these hallucinations?

Are they influenced by culture?

Do they represent a genuine transition experience?

Mediumship Research

Mediums claim to obtain information from deceased persons.

Researchers investigate:

Accuracy of information

Blind and triple blind testing

In some cases, possibility of fraud

Alternative explanations such as cold reading or telepathy

Reincarnation Research

Some report memories of previous lives.

The best known researcher in this area was Ian Stevenson.

Researchers examine:

Verifiable details reported

Birthmarks corresponding to previous life injuries

Behavioral similarities

Apparition Studies

Apparitions are reported sightings or perceptions of deceased individuals.

Researchers distinguish between:

Crisis apparitions

Bereavement apparitions

Shared apparitions

Place related apparitions

The question is whether such experiences represent:

Psychological processes

Misperceptions

Evidence of survival

The Survival Hypothesis

The Survival Hypothesis proposes that consciousness can continue after bodily death.

Supporters argue that:

Some cases contain information difficult to explain conventionally.

Similar patterns appear across cultures.

Multiple lines of evidence converge on survival.

Alternative Explanations

Researchers also consider non-survival explanations:

Mind-based processes

Hallucinations

Memory errors

Expectation effects

Grief related experiences

Some fraud or information leakage

Psi among living persons (sometimes called the Super-Psi Hypothesis)

The Super-Psi theory suggests that apparent communication with the dead might actually result from extraordinary psychic abilities of living individuals rather than survival after death.

Current Scientific Status

Controversial scientists remain skeptical because:

Evidence is difficult to replicate consistently.

Many findings can be interpreted in multiple ways.

No universally accepted mechanism explains how consciousness could survive bodly death.

However, some researchers argue that the accumulated evidence from NDEs, ADCs, mediumship, reincarnation cases, and deathbed visions deserves continued scientific investigation.

Balanced Conclusion

Research into postmortem survival is one of the most fascinating and controversial areas in consciousness studies. While there is scientific consensus that consciousness survives death, there is an active body of research examining experiences and phenomena that some interpret as supporting survival. The debate continues between survival based explanations, psychological explanations, neurological explanations: Consult with a Neurologist, and psi-based alternatives.

The strongest approach is to examine the evidence critically, remain open to multiple interpretations, and distinguish carefully between personal beliefs and scientific conclusions.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Mutual Dreaming refers to the claim that two or more people share the same dream:

Mutual Dreaming refers to the claim that two or more people share the same dream experience, either simultaneously or with remarkably similar details that they later compare.

Types of Mutual Dreaming

Simultaneous Shared Dreams
- Two people report dreaming of each other or participating in the same dream scenario during the same night.
- They later compare notes and find similarities.
Reciprocal Dreams
- Person A dreams about Person B, and Person B dreams about Person A at roughly the same time.
Dream Telepathy Claims
- Some researchers in parapsychology have suggested that information may occasionally be exchanged between minds during dreaming.

Psychological Explanations

Mainstream psychology offers several explanations for apparent mutual dreams:

Coincidence: People often dream about common themes, relationships, or shared concerns.
Selective Memory: Similarities are remembered while differences are forgotten.
Expectation Effects: After discussing dreams, people may unintentionally reconstruct memories to fit each other’s accounts.
Shared Experiences: Close friends, couples, or family members often have similar daily experiences and emotional concerns, which can produce similar dream content.

Parapsychological Perspective

Within parapsychology, mutual dreaming is sometimes viewed as a possible form of:

Dream telepathy
Mind to mind communication during sleep
Shared consciousness experiences

However, there is currently no widely accepted scientific evidence demonstrating that people can literally enter and share the same dream space. The phenomenon remains controversial and is considered unproven by conventional science.

Example

Suppose two siblings independently report dreaming that:

They were walking through the same unusual house,
Met the same deceased relative,
Heard the same message.

If the reports were recorded before either person discussed the dream, researchers might consider it a potential case of mutual dreaming worthy of investigation.

Related Concepts

Dream Telepathy
Telepathic Communication
Lucid Dreaming
Conscious Dreaming
Shared Apparitions
Phantasms of the Living

From a conventional scientific standpoint, mutual dreaming remains an intriguing anecdotal phenomenon. From a parapsychological standpoint, it is considered a possible area for investigating whether consciousness can interact beyond ordinary sensory communication.

Shervan K Shahhian

Podcast Episode: Parapsychology And Consciousness

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

Mara: Shervan K Shahhian and Liberty Psychological Association are covering serious ground today — psychokinesis and how researchers try to measure it, psychic experience and the question of non-human intelligences, and auditory hallucinations on the clinical side.

Pip: Let's start with things that move without being touched.

Psychokinesis: From Table Tipping to Large-Scale PK

Mara: The question this territory is asking is whether the mind can directly influence physical matter — and if so, at what scale, and how would you even test it?

Pip: The table levitations post sets the historical baseline. Nineteenth-century spiritualist gatherings, hands lightly placed, tables rocking. The post notes that researchers studied these claims and concluded "many cases could be explained by unconscious muscular movements exerted by the participants."

Mara: That's the ideomotor effect — people producing small muscle movements without conscious awareness, and those movements combining across multiple participants into something that looks dramatic but isn't.

Pip: So the séance table was basically a group ouija board running on collective fidgeting. Scientifically humbling, but also kind of elegant.

Mara: The large-scale PK post extends this into much bigger claimed effects — weather modification, disruptions to power grids and electronic systems, and collective consciousness influencing random number generators, as in the Global Consciousness Project. These are called macro-PK claims when effects extend beyond localized environments.

Pip: And then there's micro-PK, which is the quieter end of the spectrum — subtle statistical influences on random number generators, radioactive decay, quantum-level events. Not visible to the naked eye, detectable only across many trials.

Mara: The micro-PK post is careful to note that mainstream science attributes reported effects to statistical fluctuations, experimental error, and publication bias. The evidence hasn't met the bar for replication required for scientific acceptance, though parapsychology researchers continue investigating.

Mara: The scale question matters — from a table tilting in a Victorian parlor to weather anomalies to dice outcomes — it's the same underlying hypothesis about consciousness and matter, just tested at very different levels.

Pip: Which raises the question of what counts as a psychic experience in the first place.

Psychic Experience and the Question of Non-Human Intelligences

Mara: The psychic phenomena post maps the full terrain — telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing, mediumship — and offers a working definition: "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."

Pip: That's a carefully neutral framing. It doesn't claim proof, but it doesn't dismiss the reports either.

Mara: Right — and the post is honest that psychological processes like pattern recognition, confirmation bias, and unconscious social cue detection can account for many experiences that feel psychic. The open question is whether any remainder survives that explanation.

Pip: The non-human intelligences post pushes into stranger territory. NHIs are hypothesized entities — spirit intelligences, extraterrestrial or interdimensional beings, collective consciousnesses — believed by some researchers to interact with people through psychic means.

Mara: Associated experiences include telepathic communication, apparitions, UAP encounters, and near-death experiences. No scientific consensus that NHIs exist, but the concept sits at the intersection of parapsychology, ufology, and consciousness studies, and the post treats it as a live research question rather than a closed one.

Pip: And there's a podcast episode in this batch — Psi, UAPs, and Consciousness — that pulls these threads together directly, which tells you something about how seriously this library takes the overlap.

Mara: Both posts land in the same place: whether these experiences represent independent intelligences, aspects of human consciousness, or something else remains genuinely open.

Pip: From entities that may or may not exist, to experiences that are very much real — and need clinical attention.

When the Mind Hears What Isn't There

Mara: The auditory hallucinations post is clinical and direct: these are "hearing sounds, voices, music, or noises that are not actually present in the environment," ranging from simple buzzing or ringing to complex voices.

Pip: The causes run wide — schizophrenia, severe depression, sleep deprivation, substance use, epilepsy, dementia, even high fever. The post is explicit that treatment depends on identifying the cause, and that persistent or distressing experiences warrant professional evaluation.

Mara: The warning signs flagged are specific: voices commanding harmful actions, difficulty distinguishing hallucination from reality, sudden onset with medical symptoms. The post directs anyone in that situation to seek urgent help immediately.

Pip: From tables lifting in Victorian parlors to statistical anomalies in random number generators to voices that need a clinician — it's a wide library.

Mara: The common thread is taking unusual experience seriously enough to ask the right questions. More from the library next time.

Parapsychology: Place Related Apparitions:

Place Related Apparitions are reports of seeing, hearing, or sensing a presence that appears to be connected to a specific location rather than to a particular living person or witness.

In psychical research and folklore, these experiences are often described as recurring phenomena associated with a physical location, house, battlefield, castle, hospital, road, or other site.

Common Characteristics

The apparition is repeatedly reported in the same location.

It often appears to follow the same pattern or behavior.

It may seem unaware of observers.

Witnesses may report visual sightings, sounds, voices, footsteps, or a sensed presence.

Reports sometimes persist across many years or generations.

Examples

A figure repeatedly seen walking down a particular staircase.

A soldier reportedly appearing on a historic battlefield.

Sounds of footsteps or voices heard in a specific building.

As an example: A “lady in white” reported at the same location by multiple witnesses.

Parapsychological Interpretations

Researchers in parapsychology have proposed several explanations:

Residual Haunting Theory

The location somehow “records” past events, which are later replayed under certain conditions.

The apparition is not considered conscious or interactive.

Survival Hypothesis

The apparition represents the continued existence of a deceased person’s consciousness.

The entity may occasionally interact with witnesses.

Psi Based Explanations

Witnesses may unconsciously obtain information through psychic processes and construct an apparition experience.

This is sometimes related to the Super-Psi hypothesis.

Environmental Theories

Certain environmental conditions (lighting, acoustics, electromagnetic fields, expectation, suggestion) may contribute to unusual experiences.

Psychological Perspectives

Some Psychologists may examine:

Perception and misperception

Memory reconstruction

Suggestion and expectation

Emotional significance of places

Cultural beliefs about haunted locations

These explanations do not necessarily imply that witnesses are imagining the experience; rather, they explore how normal cognitive processes may contribute to unusual perceptions.

Research Status

Within science, there is no generally accepted evidence that place related apparitions are caused by spirits or surviving consciousness. However, such experiences remain an active area of study within the fields of parapsychology, anomalistic psychology, and consciousness research.

Place related apparitions are particularly interesting because they raise the question of whether certain locations may become associated with recurring anomalous experiences, regardless of who the witness is.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Phantasms of the Living:

Phantasms of the Living is the title of a book by members of the Society for Psychical Research.

What Does “Phantasms of the Living” Mean?

The term refers to apparitions, visions, or sensory experiences of living people, rather than spirits of the dead. The authors collected hundreds of reports in which a person claimed to see, hear, or sense someone who was actually alive but often far away.

Examples included:

Seeing a distant relative suddenly appear in a room.
Hearing the voice of a living person when they were not physically present.
Experiencing a vivid impression of someone during a crisis.

Crisis Apparitions

Some cases involved what researchers called crisis apparitions, experiences occurring when the person perceived was undergoing a serious event such as:

An accident
Severe illness
Emotional distress
Death or near death situations

The researchers wondered whether these experiences might reflect some form of telepathic communication rather than spirit visitation.

Interpretation

Some proposed that some apparitions of living persons might be explained by:

Telepathy (mind to mind influence)
Unconscious psychological processes
Coincidence in some cases

They did not claim that all reports proved paranormal phenomena, but they argued that certain cases deserved scientific investigation.

Modern Perspectives

Today, some psychologists might explain such experiences through factors such as:

Memory distortions
Expectation and suggestion
Stress and emotional arousal
Sleep-related experiences
Coincidence and selective recall

Parapsychologists, however, still regard Phantasms of the Living as a landmark work because it was one of the first systematic attempts to collect and analyze spontaneous apparition reports.

Historical Importance

The book remains influential in:

Parapsychology
Psychical Research
Studies of apparitions and anomalous experiences
Research on telepathy and consciousness

For some historians, Phantasms of the Living represents the beginning of large-scale, evidence gathering research into spontaneous paranormal experiences rather than relying solely on folklore or anecdotal ghost stories.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Apparitions are experiences in which a person perceives a figure, presence, or image,…

Apparitions are experiences in which a person perceives a figure, presence, or image that appears real but may not be explained by an obvious physical source. Apparitions may often be described as seeing a deceased person, a living person who is not physically present, an unknown figure, or a non-human entity.

Types of Apparitions

Crisis Apparitions
- Reported when someone appears to another person during a time of extreme danger, illness, or death.
- The apparition may be later linked to a real-life crisis occurring at the same time.
Bereavement Apparitions
- Experienced after the death of a loved one.
- The experiencer may see, hear, sense, or even feel the presence of the deceased.
- These experiences are relatively common among grieving individuals and do not necessarily indicate mental illness.
Place Related Apparitions
- Apparitions reported repeatedly in a particular location.
- Commonly associated with “haunted” places.
Living Person Apparitions
- Reports of seeing someone who is alive but physically elsewhere.
- Sometimes called “phantasms of the living” in parapsychological literature.

Scientific Explanations

Psychologists and neuroscientists have proposed several explanations:

Misinterpretation of sensory information: (shadows, reflections, low light).
Expectation and suggestion: influencing perception.
Grief related experiences: especially after a significant loss.
Sleep related phenomena: such as hypnagogic (falling asleep) or hypnopompic (waking up) hallucinations.
Stress, fatigue, trauma, or certain neurological conditions: consult with a Nuerologist, may also contribute to apparition like experiences.

Parapsychological Perspectives

Within the field of Parapsychology, apparitions have been studied as potential evidence for:

Telepathic communication.
Survival of consciousness after death.
Unknown aspects of human consciousness.
Interactions with non-physical entities.

Researchers associated with the Society for Psychical Research collected thousands of apparition reports and attempted to analyze patterns statistically and historically.

Are Apparitions Evidence of Life After Death?

There is currently no scientific consensus that apparitions prove survival after death. Mainstream science generally interprets apparition experiences through psychological, neurological, and environmental factors. However, some researchers in psychical research argue that certain well documented cases remain difficult to explain completely.

Important Distinction

An apparition experience by itself is not the same as a psychotic disorder. Many psychologically healthy people report sensing or seeing the presence of a deceased loved one, particularly during bereavement. Mental health professionals evaluate such experiences based on the broader context, including distress, functioning, and whether other symptoms are present.

In summary, an apparition is a perceived presence or figure that appears real to the experiencer but lacks an immediately identifiable physical source. Interpretations range from normal psychological processes to paranormal or survival of consciousness hypotheses, depending on one’s perspective and the available evidence.

Shervan K Shahhian

Unquestioned Beliefs are ideas, assumptions, or “truths” that,…

Unquestioned beliefs are ideas, assumptions, or “truths” that a person accepts automatically without examining, testing, or critically reflecting on them.

These beliefs often operate in the background of thinking and may shape emotions, behavior, identity, and relationships without the person fully realizing it.

Common Examples

“If I fail, I am worthless.”
“People cannot be trusted.”
“Strong people never ask for help.”
“My thoughts must be true.”
“Success equals happiness.”
“Everyone is judging me.”

Some unquestioned beliefs come from:

Family upbringing
Culture or religion
Trauma or painful experiences
Social conditioning
Repeated messages from authority figures
Personal interpretations formed early in life

In Psychology

Unquestioned beliefs may be closely related to:

Core beliefs
Cognitive schemas
Assumptions
Implicit biases

For example, in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, therapists may help people identify beliefs they have never challenged, especially beliefs connected to anxiety, depression, shame, or self worth.

A person might believe:

“Because I feel rejected, I am rejected.”

The belief feels factual because it has gone unexamined.

Why They Matter

Unquestioned beliefs may:

Distort perception
Increase emotional suffering
Create rigid thinking
Reinforce fear or avoidance
Influence decision-making unconsciously

But not all unquestioned beliefs are harmful. Some provide stability, meaning, or moral structure.

Signs a Belief May Be “Unquestioned”

It feels “obviously true.”
You react emotionally when it is challenged.
You rarely ask, “Where did this belief come from?”
You assume everyone sees the world the same way.
Contradictory evidence is ignored or dismissed.

Healthy Examination of Beliefs

Questioning beliefs may not mean rejecting everything. It means becoming more aware and reflective.

Helpful questions include:

“What evidence supports this belief?”
“Where did I learn this?”
“Is this always true?”
“Could there be another interpretation?”
“Does this belief help or harm me?”

This process is connected to metacognition, thinking about one’s own thinking, and psychological flexibility.

Shervan K Shahhian

Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the nature of Conscious,…

Consciousness Studies is an interdisciplinary field that investigates the nature of conscious experience how and why we are aware of ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and the world around us.

It brings together researchers from several disciplines, including:

Psychology
Neuroscience
Philosophy of Mind
Cognitive Science
Artificial Intelligence
Parapsychology (a controversial and widely accepted field)

Major Questions in Consciousness Studies

Researchers explore questions such as:

What is consciousness?
How does subjective experience arise from mind activity?
What is the relationship between the mind and the consciousness?
Do animals possess consciousness?
Could machines become conscious?
What happens to consciousness during sleep, anesthesia, meditation, or altered states?

The “Hard Problem” of Consciousness

The philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “hard problem of consciousness.”

It asks:

Why does physical mind activity produce subjective experience at all?

For example, neuroscience can identify which mind regions process color, but why the experience of seeing “red” feels the way it does remains an open question.

Major Theories

Some influential theories may include:

Physicalism

Consciousness emerges from physical processes in the mind.

Panpsychism

The view that consciousness, or proto-consciousness, may be a fundamental feature of reality.

Areas of Research

Researchers study:

Attention and awareness
Dreams and lucid dreaming
Meditation and contemplative states
Hypnosis
Near-death experiences, NDA
Altered states of consciousness
Brain injuries and disorders of consciousness: Please Consult with a Neurologist
Psychedelic experiences: May Cause Life Long Hallucinations

Consciousness Studies and Parapsychology

Some consciousness researchers investigate reports of phenomena such as telepathy, psychokinesis (PK), remote viewing, and other anomalous experiences. These topics remain highly controversial because evidence has achieved broad scientific consensus. Mainstream controversial consciousness research generally focuses on phenomena that may be reliably observed and replicated under controlled conditions.

Why It Matters

Consciousness studies addresses one of the deepest questions in science and philosophy:

How does subjective experience arise, and what does it tell us about the nature of mind, and reality?

Despite major advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains one of the most challenging and fascinating subjects in modern inquiry.

Shervan K Shahhian

Parapsychology: Macro-PK (Macro-Psychokinesis) refers to alleged psychokinetic effects,…

Macro-PK (Macro-Psychokinesis) refers to alleged psychokinetic effects that are large enough to be directly observed without specialized scientific instruments.

In parapsychology, psychokinesis (PK) is the claimed ability of the mind to influence physical objects or events without any known physical interaction. Macro-PK is distinguished from micro-PK, which involves very small statistical effects, such as attempts to influence random number generators.

Examples of Reported Macro-PK Phenomena

Table levitation

Movement of objects without physical contact

Bending of metal objects

Spontaneous movement of furniture

Apports (the alleged appearance or transportation of objects)

Physical disturbances associated with poltergeist cases

Reports of psychically induced electrical or mechanical effects

Historical Context

Reports of Macro-PK have appeared in:

Spiritualist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Claims surrounding Prophet Ted Owens, who attributed large-scale weather and societal effects to interactions with non-human intelligences.

Scientific Perspective

Macro-PK remains highly controversial. While numerous eyewitness accounts and case reports exist, mainstream controversial science has not accepted Macro-PK as a demonstrated phenomenon because:

Mainstream controversial science has not accepted Macro-PK , because they can not or do not want to accept it. Not being able to explain a fact, does not make it false.

Controlled replications have been difficult but in many instances successful.

Alternative explanations such as it being real, misperception, suggestion, coincidence, fraud, or methodological weaknesses often cannot be ruled out.

No widely accepted physical mechanism explains how consciousness could directly produce such effects, but it is a fact.

Some individuals claim to possess psychokinetic (PK) abilities but are unable to demonstrate them. These individuals may be fraudsters who deceive others into believing they have genuine PK powers.

Within parapsychology, Macro-PK is often considered the most dramatic category of psychokinetic claims because it involves effects that, if conclusively demonstrated under controlled conditions, would have major implications for our understanding of consciousness and physical reality.

Shervan K Shahhian

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.