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When you're typing fast, you don't have time to mix in all the caveats, cautions and quid pro quo's. This leaves you wide open to people who know what they're talking about:
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You've mentioned in previous Konspiracy Korners about Rupert Sheldrake and idea of a legitimate 6th sense. Extending ki, long body, collective conciousness, perhaps these are all concepts describing different parts of the same elephant. I don't think it's mumbo-jumbo. We should entertain ideas until difinitively proven incorrect. It's no slight to give credence to an idea that someone else thinks is impossible. That's where competitive advantages are born.
One technique that's worked for me is to exhale for 7 seconds 3 times consecutively. I've heard that your brain understands that it does not need to be in a fight or flight state of anxiety if your body has the ability to do this and, accordingly activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Whether that's true or not, it certainly helps!
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By "aiki mumbo jumbo" I'm thinking of a class I took at Kannagara, in which a white belt raised his hand after class and praised sensei for "tickling" his spine from behind during a bokken practice. Students were more or less required to sign off on the fact that Sensei could practice telekinesis with his ki extension. The widespread nature of this attitude in aikido dojos is a constant sense of amusement for Dr. D.
Some of these amigos are not far off from thinking that the Ki extension in Dragonball Z, or at least in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, are attainable in reality. :- )
That said, Dr. Sheldrake has made a career out of studying "long body" phenomena in nature. We say that birds fly "by instinct" but what, precisely, does that mean in terms of mechanical consciousness?
Animal psi has been experienced directly by about half of pet owners. For instance, one time he called 64 veterinarians in the U.K. and 63 of them told him that it was routine and predictable, that cat owners should expect to find their cat hiding when the owner went to get them into the car ...
Sheldrake has documented, for peer-reviewed journals, the fact that some dogs can predict when their owners are coming home - absent sounds, smells, routine patterns or any other variable. He has demonstrated that humans can perceive being stared at from behind, at a level significantly (not massively) beyond chance. He's done experience on "joint attention" such as exemplified in the Global Consciousness Project. The GCP's computers stopped generating random numbers about 16-20 hours before (!) the 9/11 attacks:
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After much thought, Sheldrake has pushed forward his hypothesis of "morphic resonance" to explain all these phenomena at once -- basically, the idea that non-conscious matter forms "habits" or "memories" as crystals seem to, and as the Double Slit Experiment seems to confirm in tiny particles.
Sheldrake's site is a fascinating read. He is a reasonable, soft-spoken man in the Freeman Dyson mode, who has systematically applied cutting-edge experimental design to a dozen different such subjects.
I would be very grateful to read a half-a-dozen theories from Denizens that speak to the question of, "IF a parrot can read a human being's mind, and IF random numbers on computers can be influenced by human emotions, and IF these other things have a basis, THEN my own explanation of that would be ... "
Personally, I lean (lean!) toward the idea of C.S. Lewis' "good dreams." That paranormal-type manifestations, the 0.1% of them that are real, are usually here to remind us of a broader context than materialism. But who knows.
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As to Carroll's "long body" teachings and his historic NFL defense ... it seems to me that all of Sheldrake's phenomena are very subtle, and need very quiet conditions to manifest. If NFL players could extend their consciousness and read minds during the maelstrom of an NFL power sweep, I'd be pretty surprised. But the intention to "play for each other" is of course documented by four or five seasons' worth of having the NFL's best defense :- )
Cheers,
Jeff
