The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Posts tagged with “ESP”

Time’s Taboos: Dirty Thoughts on Systems, Syntropy, and Psi

Thursday, 16 July, 2015

Classical physics, with its totally determinative, forward-in-time, billiard-ball causation, requires sweeping anomalies like psi under the rug, not to mention resigning ourselves to an absence of higher meaning and direction in the universe. Even the local islands of order allowed within the framework of dynamical systems theory that emerged in the middle of the last […]

Unknown Unknowns: Psi, Association & the Physics of Information

Sunday, 5 July, 2015

I have always been skeptical of parapsychologists, because their experiments and their theories borrow the standard concepts of space and time dimensions from physics. These concepts seem obsolete to me. They are not appropriate for understanding telepathy, or the moving of objects at a distance, or ghosts, or Melchizedek. I have always been struck also […]

Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual

Wednesday, 6 May, 2015

I’ve mentioned several times the debt I owe to J.W. Dunne and his 1927 book An Experiment with Time. Dunne was not a scientific researcher or a parapsychologist by training, but a military man and aeronautical engineer who became interested in questions of time and its structure after becoming aware of uncanny examples of apparent […]

Psi, the Enjoyment Body, and the Electric Power of Yes

Monday, 27 April, 2015

Like many people, I am fascinated by synchronicities that occur in my life, and I even see them as signposts on my life’s path. Yet the “nuts and bolts” side of me agrees with Arthur Koestler in his wonderful 1972 survey of ESP research, The Roots of Coincidence: Carl Jung’s theory of synchronicity is a […]

Prophecies, Time Loops, and Bubble Realities: La Jetée and The Sacrifice

Wednesday, 22 April, 2015

If precognition is real, then we have to take account of the range of sci-fi effects it would produce, effects that go beyond the strictly ‘prophetic.’ Because we fail to see how our consciousness is receptive to the future and how our actions contribute to, and only in a minority of cases confirm, that future, […]

Don’t Look Now: Witches, Weird Sisters, and the Eroticism of ESP

Saturday, 18 April, 2015

Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 paranormal thriller Don’t Look Now, based on a Daphne du Maurier short story (and now finally released on the Criterion Collection), is one of my desert-island top 10 (probably top 5) favorite films, and it is hands down the greatest Fortean film ever made. Short of UFOs, it has everything you could […]

Coincidence, Chaos, & Archetypes in Our Science-Fictional World

Tuesday, 14 April, 2015

You don’t have to be a hardheaded materialist skeptic or an atheist to be troubled by the idea of synchronicity. The fundamental mystery—or really, outrage—of synchronicities is they seem arranged, stage managed, in a way that is impossible without imagining an active higher intelligence taking interest in guiding us and arranging the events of the […]

Scarabs & the ‘Send’ Button: Synchronicity as Misrecognized Psi

Friday, 10 April, 2015

During the weeks I was researching my previous post on 9/11 and premonitions of trauma, I had a very powerful, uncanny experience that contained, in miniature, all of that post’s themes. It began with an unusually bad day at work, where I’d felt extremely guilty over a group email I had sent to coworkers that, […]

The Real Infinite Improbability Drive: Cloaking Devices, UFOs, and ESP

Sunday, 7 December, 2014

Away in front of them a huge white dome that bulged against the sky cracked down in the middle, split, and slowly folded itself down into the ground. … Beneath it lay uncovered a huge starship, one hundred and fifty metres long, shaped like a sleek running shoe, perfectly white and mindboggingly beautiful. At the […]

Psi of Regret: Pitfalls of Prophecy from Patanjali to Paul Muad’Dib

Sunday, 23 November, 2014

It’s been over twenty years since I last read Dune, but inspired partly by the phenomenal documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, I recently re-read Frank Herbert’s masterpiece and a few of the sequels. Although the latter are uneven, I need hardly say that Dune itself holds up magnificently. It is still the one novel I would put […]