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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Place Related Apparitions
    • Apparitions reported repeatedly in a particular location.
    • Commonly associated with “haunted” places.
  4. 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.

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