Tl;Dr - Posting about internal experiences oddly has a net negative contribution to non-specialized forums.
Alright, this has been quite a long time coming. I feel like in general, posting about esp, raising general awareness about the very real phenomena that arise during meditation and cultivation does more harm than good in our society...currently. Fundamentally, I come from a scientific background. I don't think anything should be believed unless there is concrete, repeatable evidence that supports its existence. I think the only way to distinguish between reality and fantasy is EVIDENCE.
It irks me that the popularization of psychic phenomena has largely been through unscrupulous and/or unfit individuals. Charlatans, quacks, people with almost zero experience, or (and I mean no offense, this is the truth) mentally ill individuals have taken over spirituality. It's basically like western medicine in the 1800s - you went to the hospital to get sick and drank quack concoctions to have death.
The common thread with people like these is that they offer no repeatable evidence. This is a BIG fucking problem. At the very core of psychic phenomena is the deep relationship we (everything in the universe) have with each other. Psychic events are the spontaneous disappearance of the illusion of separation we normally feel - they are ALL fundamentally about affecting or being affected by something through non-physical means. Without being grounded in reality, there is absolutely nothing to distinguish them from fantasy. I heard this a long time ago, I've said it before on this forum and I meant it from the bottom of my heart - anything that can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I think it does tremendous harm to society encourage fantastical thinking. I recently visited some conspiracy forums and quite frankly I don't want anything that I do to be associated with them. I especially don't want my methods of investigation to seem like they were derived from theirs. Qi gong, neikung, meditation were all developed as sciences to explore the mind. Period.
Lastly, let me get some questions out of the way:
1. If the evidence for psychic phenomena is clearly available (for example the duke university experiments or personal investigation), how comes it's not part of mainstream science?
I don't fucking know. Seriously. No I don't believe in the illuminati or anything like that because I haven't seen a compelling reason to. I just.don't.know. And quite frankly, I stopped caring.
2. What about James Randi?
What about him? He's not a scientist. He has absolutely no research credentials. From what I've seen on his public forums, the tests he was conducting were an absolute joke. There's a pretty good reason he's not cited in any paper in credible scientific repositories like Nature.
3. Do you still experience psychic events?
Every day.
4. Do you think the general public will wake up to psychic experiences?
I think at a deep level, people already believe in esp. From what I've read, the vast majority (70%+) of people have experienced something they couldn't explain and usually dismiss it. The truth is esp is such a hard wired part of the human experience, it's even in our language. Things like "I got a gut feeling" betray how common psychic phenomena are to humans. Why would someone say that? (HINT: there's a major chakra in the stomach region that's responsible for warning us about danger). There are 100s of little things like that. Everything we do as human beings shows that we are deeply connected to our psychic nature. There's nothing to wake up to, because we already know that.
5. Are you special?
Yes, but not because I have psychic abilities (which, by the way, I simply got through practicing meditation and neikung). My personality makes me "special" just as everyone is truly unique in their own way. You are a whole universe.
. The weird thing is - it smelled a LOT like something was burning. I looked it up when I woke up and apparently, I didn't know this at the time, but apollo astronauts all said that it smelled like gunpowder on the moon. Since it has no atmosphere, the moon is constantly bombarded with little pellets that basically burn up the surface all the time. I had no idea about that. Whatever your view, whether it was my brain subconsciously taking all these factors into account or whether people can actually get out of their bodies, I had a very real "physical" experience that accurately reflected what a moon visit would be like.
