From: Share Long <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 1:58 PM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo Effect?
turq, I think your theory about wanting to be special is scientifically testable. Because I'm guessing that it's tied to survival. When we were all cave people and there was a slaughtered wooly mammoth to feast upon, the tribe leader gave the biggest and best portions to those who were *special* to him in some way: his mate, his offspring, his allies. So I bet this drive to be special is located somewhere in the primitive brain. Could be that this portion of the brain got over stimulated in early childhood by an over abundance of threatening circumstances. You may be onto something here, Share, because I have strong past life memories of those times. I was the cave-guy who made sure never to be singled out as "special" because that way I got to stay in the cave and boink the "special" guys' wives while they were out getting stomped into goo by wooly mammoths. :-) And I definitely agree with the idea of "wanting to be special" as "primitive." It was then, and it still is now. :-) On Monday, April 14, 2014 2:02 AM, TurquoiseBee <[email protected]> wrote: From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 8:48 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo Effect? Some of the people Randi have had to put up with! He had a guy who could turn pages of a book with his mind. He'd sit with a book in front of him and the pages turn without him touching them! I saw the film even. Randi asked if him he could do it with a sheet of glass between him and the book and he said of course he could. He couldn't obviously, how anyone could be so deluded they weren't aware they were just breathing on the pages is beyond me. The human capacity for self-delusion must be near infinite. Which is why believers can't be trusted to examine themselves properly. He's had harder subjects than that though, telepaths and mind readers that turned out not to be are common as muck, cold readers even if they aren't aware that is what they are doing. Loads of them still make a living even after they failed in the test Randi set. "It was set up to fail" they claim afterwards. Whereas before they were keen to demonstrate their powers under conditions they themselves agreed to. To keep their belief in their powers intact they scapegoat Randi as unfair. Go figure. It's the "When Prophecy Fails" syndrome all over again. A prophecy fail makes the TBs believe in it even more. Go figure. There is simply no accounting for self-importance and an inability to say, "I was wrong." People are willing to come up with so many twisted theories to explain *their* mystical experience. And as far as I can tell, all of this is driven by self-importance. They're declaring "My experience was SPECIAL" (and of course, silently saying "And so am I"), and they're desperate for any way to "prove" it. What such people are unable to cope with is someone hearing about "their experience" and saying, "No, it's not special at all, and neither are you." ---In [email protected], <turquoiseb@...> wrote : From: salyavin808 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 7:54 AM Subject: Re: [FairfieldLife] Are the TM-Sidhis nothing but Placebo Effect? ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : As to Randi, I'll stand by what I said about the strength of his bias; and I'll just add that his professional integrity is, er, not of the highest. He undoubtably thinks you're all mad but it's up to you to prove otherwise. He will organise an experiment and you have to agree that it's within your powers before he will go ahead with it. This is what is called "pre-biasing the audience." I suspect that the very *definition* of Randi's supposed lack of integrity is the fact that he thinks people who believe this shit are all mad. It's up to *them* to prove they're not. They just can't, except to each other. As for "all mad," I'm with Anartaxius on this -- it's becoming more and more difficult to read FFL. It's a madhouse, except for a few voices like Salyavin's and his.
