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I’m not sure if you came to a conclusion or any specific point there Dan, but I’m sure we’ve all thought the same things from time to time. It’s for all the reasons that you state that I do not consider apports to be very relivant
I’m sure there are many cases of fakery, and the genuine cases? well, they never prooved any historical theory nor gave any great enlightenment that I’m aware of… at best they are ‘gold stars’; for being good in class.
For me, psychic questing has nothing to do with collecting apports; I’m interested in historic and metaphysical discoveries, and using the 6th sense or what ever attributes beyond the 5 senses to investigate the world we live in.
To impress a girl, or be the great ‘showman-shaman’… well, equally that’s just ego-nonsense and ultimately shallow and pointless… as you observe, may as well just play D&D and be honest to all that you’re playing..
For me too it’s about the personal journey. The ‘meaningful coincidence’ of synchronicity is a personal affair. There’s no need to prove anything to anybody.
Maybe, though, I should be less inclined to view found artefacts as materialistic traps or props to justify the path taken and spur the quester on. As ‘power objects’, such artefacts can be used for both creative and destructive ends.
Quote:I mean, comparing it to the placebo effect is all very well, but that’s something that doctors do either if they really can’t do anything except pretend they can help in order to keep the patient’s spirits up, or they reckon the disease is all in the patient’s mind and they don’t want to waste expensive drugs on a non-existent illnessThat’s a very orthodox view of the placebo effect, Dan. Placebos can have very real effects on a persons health, and they don’t necessarily involve deceit on the part of the healer, just belief on the part of the patient (one of the fundamentals of the alternative health movement is to challenge the unbalanced power relationship between doctor and patient that exists in orthodox medicine).
Likewise, synchronicities (objectively, coincidences – even highly probable ones) can have a real and profound effect on a person’s spiritual development.
Since no-one on this thread has admitted to any great psychic ability there’s been a tendency to theorise – interesting parallels between quantum physics and psychology, but no real light shed on the apports phenomenon. But I don’t suppose those who have experienced such things have a ready explanation either…
There have been cases where placebo drugs have actually cured some illnesses where conventional drugs have failed. It is undoubtedly the faith of the patient that effects the cure, as they have been told that the placebo is a new wonder drug.
I think the phenomena of apports/ artifact retrieval works in a related way. From personal experience i have found that if there is doubt within the mind on the part of those who might expect to find an artifact that may be an apport, it probably won’t happen. I have personally been on quests where self-doubt creeps in and the artifacts that may have been psychically glimpsed, do not materialise. I believe that somehow the faith of the group allows the item to materialise through collective belief that it will at a certain time and place. I can’t provide any hard evidence on why it happens, although Quantum Physics/ Mechanics is starting to provide a few possible clues.Re the placebo, I saw a programme in Feb on Spiritual Healing. It had its failings I thought, but did highlight some interesting experiments -
In an experiment where some people were treated by a real spiritual healer and others by an actor pretending to be a healer, both groups improved by the same amount.
In similar experiment some people received surgery on their knee, while others went through an elaborate charade of having the same surgical operation. Those who had the fake surgery also healed.
In an experiment on people with Alzheimer’s, the brains of a group injected with saline began to produce Dopamine.
What this seemed to show was that the healing power wasn’t coming from the healer, as has been said here, but from within the person being healed. The healer’s role seems to be to facilitate a person’s own abilities. So perhaps having a psychic/medium really acts to bring out the latent abilities within others by making them believe something will happen. In which case a charlatan might do just as well. But then would they really be a charlatan? Aren’t powerful magical figures in mythology often also tricksters?
Michael
I’m being slightly ‘off topic’ here, but I’m motivated by the placebo idea.
As I practice Tai Chi, there is a lot of philosophy of what ‘chi’ is, many teachers dont believe it to be anything other than chinese metaphor, preferring to focus on Western measurements like blood circulation etc.
Yet Acupuncture is a metaphysical science that studies the manipulation of ‘chi’, a thing that cant be seen of measured in a ‘physics’ ‘scientific’ type way; so Acupuncture is one of the ‘healings’ damned as being a placebo (and there probably are some acupuncturists who are frauds) Yet, China has done many studies on this and Acupuncture has even been used to heal animals… how do you suggest a placebo to a dog or cat whilst your jabbing them with a needle?
a great book I read years ago, ‘Needles of Stone’ by Tom Graves, suggested the idea that Standing Stones and other landmarks are acupuncture of the landscape, directing ‘ley lines’ as an acupuncturist would direct chi around a body with needles… fascinating idea and very relivant to questing in ‘how ancient/sacred sites work’, type category.
Yes, well… I wasn’t really trying to get into the question of spiritual healing there, just the rather strange suggestion that the placebo effect also applied to Psychic Questing. Yes, obviously belief matters quite a lot in all things magickal, but if you’ve got constant “miraculous” phenomena taking place, some of which are of very dubious quality indeed, and everybody privately has doubts about them, but nobody says anything because there’s a sort of unspoken agreement that it would spoil everybody’s fun, don’t you end up with a level of collective belief somewhere in the region of zero? Clearly a well-executed bit of fakery that comes off might convince everybody (except whoever did it) that further miracles are possible, thus making them more probable; but it would have to be done VERY convincingly indeed, since ANY suspicion in the minds of the group is going to sabotage things completely, no?
And in any case, if things found on Quests whose origin is strongly suspected by those involved to be a bit dodgy are treated as if they’re sort of symbolically genuine for some reason linked to quantum physics, and lumped in with the less doubtful finds for purposes of ritual activity, is there any point in Psychic Questing at all?
I mean, let’s suppose I’m on a mission to find those 7 holy daggers featured in the Omen movies because I need them to slay the Antichrist – in a spiritual, ritualistic sense, of course – not as in sticking them in anybody. Somebody whose sincerity I don’t doubt at all comes up with a couple of decent-looking daggers, but a few other characters I’m much more dubious about start jumping on the bandwagon with increasingly doubtful cutlery they allegedly found by psychic means. Do I just not say anything because if we all quietly agree not to admit that we have doubts, we can ignore them? Do I then go ahead with my ritual and assume that it probably worked, even if I’m privately convinced that 5 of my daggers are fakes, and so is everybody else? Do I need even ONE proper dagger, or can I just go on a “symbolic quest” to my kitchen knife-drawer? Where do you draw the line?
That’s the trouble with physical evidence – it has to be convincing, and as soon as you start suggesting that a bit of blatant fakery doesn’t matter so long as it keeps the pot boiling, the whole edifice falls apart! I recall reading somewhere that when he was President, Ronald Reagan used to tell anecdotes about his heroic battles with the Japs in WWII, failing to realise that he had gotten so confused about the borderline between fantasy and reality that he had forgotten about never having been in action against the enemy at all, and he was quoting heroic scenes from his movies in the belief that he’d actually done these things. By this strange new principle of Quantum Truth Uncertainty, should he have been given a medal anyway? And is the Black Alchemist really dead, or just hiding from Harry Potter?
Ah, I only brought up the spiritual healing thing because of the placebo effect. I’m not really addressing the fake artifacts issue – I don’t see much point in doing it (faking artifacts that is, rather than addressing the issue). I’m really addressing (probably not too well, but it was a few posts ago now!) the original question of whether you need a powerful psychic or physical medium to make questing a worthwhile proposition to begin with. I think the placebo evidence may well have a bearing on this, where the important factor turns out not to be the healer but the openness of the person being healed. If your would-be questors are open to the possibility of questing, then that might enable them to connect with whatever it is that produces results (which may or may not mean physical artifacts). Into this scenario you might get someone who pretends that they are psychically gifted, or who believes themselves to be so. Perhaps it doesn’t matter too much if the results don’t depend on the alleged powers of a single individual (and who knows – the pretend or delusional psychic might themselves end up churning out valid material in spite of themselves).
I’m really challenging the supposition that you need a good physical medium, which is where we started. As we don’t understand the ins and outs of high strangeness (well, I don’t anyway), to think that you need a powerful individual to get started is quite an assumption.
Uh-oh! I hope I’m not going to get labelled as the guy who thought it was OK to fake an apport to kickstart a quest!
Mad Dan had it exactly right with his Merlin and the Holy Amethyst scenario. I’m talking about multiplying the potential number of states that reality can collpase into so that you stand a better chance of it collapsing into the state you want it to. This is subtly different to the idea of a placebo effect or altering the perceptions of the people on the quest. Did anyone read “Dancers at the End of Time” by Michael Moorcock? I’m thinking of a similar kind of reality manipulation although one which is more nebulous than that which Moorcock describes.
On the Merlin front, Mad Dan, where did Merlin tell you to look for the Holy Amethyst? Stop. Don’t think. What’s the first thing that comes into your mind?. It might be worth checking that out even though you think it’s a “bogus” lead. Did you read the brass casket part of the Andy Collins interview? They thought thet were making something up – yet what they (collectively) “concocted” was exactly what they found in reality.
There is something interesting in that.
I do believe that it is actually impossible to ‘make anything up’.
I do believe that all our ideas come from somewhere else. Nobody is capable of ‘creating’ an original idea, only in ‘percieving’ or ‘picking up an idea’. When we need a good idea how do you get one? You mentally pause, search & wait, then *ping!* (the light bulb moment) and you recieve your idea… the idea that anyone can manually ‘construct’ an idea is nonsense.
I understand the word ‘Idea’ as being and interelationship between the ‘I’ (or ego/self) and ‘Dea’, some ancient goddess of enlightenment/inspiration.
So with the idea that all ideas have an ‘external origin’… there must be a universal pool/source that we all can tap into. This explains why even, sensitive fiction writers seem to have certain ‘truths’ within their stories; or that many authors will (unconciously) be writing from a similar theme/origin.
This doesnt condone or support fakery in anyway, I’m just saying that ultimately, nothing can be invented. Fakes and Frauds are manipulating, decieving, dishonest, and the desire to even want to be like that, I find very odd and not in the slightest bit enlightened… they are working from a purely egocentric foundation that cares little for other peoples sanity/intelligence or integrity.
With so many historical and ‘Reality’ enigmas, why create a fake quest? Just pick a ‘real’ topic and get investigating.
Hmmm, now if Yuri’s idea has anything to it (not that he would be able to lay claim to it
), then even the fakers and frauds need to pull their ideas from somewhere. It seems to me that Dea might have a brother or sister, the ancient god or goddess of disinformation, misdirection and downright porkies. Hang about, sounds like that would be the Demiurge, unwitting maker of the illusory world, and Dea would be Sophia.Michael
supernaturalist wrote:It seems to me that Dea might have a brother or sister, the ancient god or goddess of disinformation, misdirection and downright porkies.I vote for Loki…
has anything to it (not that he would be able to lay
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