The Women Who Stare At (old) Goats
PSIONICS * PARAPSYCHOLOGY * PARAPHYSICS * NEUROTHEOLOGY
Self-Regulation is the antidote to corporate & political mind control.
PSI HAPPENS. The Supernatural, the Paranormal, the Unknown. Mankind has always been fascinated with dreams, intuitions, imagination, inspiration, charisma, otherworldly experiences, spirituality, psychoenergetic phenomena, extraordinary abilities, and the Transpersonal. The first rituals related to great cycles -- seasonal celebrations, healing, birth, death, rebirth. Beliefs are contagious (memes). But psi can affect us unconsciously, whether we "believe" in it or not. Few will deny that mind is mystifying.
Psi culture is not a subculture, but something we all inhabit unconsciously and notice at certain points in our lives when the uncanny or numinous intrudes on our everyday world. Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse."
There are several subcultures who's worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do from governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be superstitious sometimes. But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief.
The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, holistic mysticism, or physicalism. A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness.
HARNESSING REALITY
The fashionable term for mind/matter interaction is now "intentionality", as if that explains anything. You may as well call it free will, or True Will, like the magicians do. Yet to name it intentionality doesn't make it so. It is a fantasy of intentionality, a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at the subtle level perturbs outcomes PHYSICALLLY in some desirable manner. Which is not to ignore psychosocial effects or mobilization of immune function.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. The notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoiesis. The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable.
ITS NO SECRET
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth with origins in the existential philosophers of the 19th Century. It can also be motivated by control issues - as a control fantasy rather than a proper characterization of lived reality. From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetypal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds"; in Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion. Is this notion harboring a God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world?
EMERGENCE
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action not just wishful thinking. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; but just the opposite, by criticality and emergent process.
Correlation is not identity. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. If you think it works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated.
Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
PsiCoSomatics
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations and self-promotional agenda. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations. For example, the Many-Worlds Theory (MWI) doesn't require 'nonlocality' at all.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'resonance', 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, it may be existant in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both.
SpyCoSomatics
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others, ESP (information transfer) being the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting. Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
Psi Phenomena include telepathy, remote viewing, intentionality, distance healing, pk, synchronicity, hypnosis, altered states, mind control, and more. There are spiritual and subversive technologies for altering our conscious and unconscious perceptions. The antidote to having your mind controlled externally is to learn to control it internally with self-regulation techniques, such as self-hypnosis, meditation, binaural beat brain tech, and biofeedback. Seek the truth that underlies each cherished belief.