The Rattling Chains of Supernaturalism and The Occult

Philosophy of Mind
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I have spent time studying ideomotor effect since at least 2001.
In that time I have also study the psychology aspect.
Carl Jung never endorsed “outright supernaturalism” as an established scientific fact, but he explicitly discussed paranormal and ghostly phenomena in texts like Psychology and the Occult and Volume 8 of his Collected Works. Rather than framing them as supernatural violations of natural law, he treated them as objective “psychic facts” rooted in the unconscious or the acausal principle of synchronicity.

Several foundational figures in psychology have explored supernaturalism, paranormal phenomena, and spiritual beliefs.

From my subjective experience, it say’s that I have invested time and effort into trying to get to the bottom of why the effect produces coherent messages.

The bias is not in the coherent messages themselves - but can be imported in the interpretation of said messages, regardless of which way a person leans.

Which is in itself an interesting things which requires study as to why this was the case.
For example, did humans have another way of achieving the same?
Should we think that however the effect was discovered, that until then the potential never existed?

What this tells us is that until ideomotor effect was discovered, people were either relying on their own interpretations, the interpretations of others, or a mix of both.
Ideomotor effect made it possible for a third unknown voicing to interact with the human condition.

TO reiterate.

What This “Third Unknown Voicing” Might Be

The subconscious- A part of the mind that is not accessible to conscious awareness but can express itself through the body.

A field of intelligence - A collective or universal intelligence that is not located in any individual mind but can be accessed through the ideomotor interface.

A combination - The interaction between subconscious and field - both shaping the messages.

Historical context - It explains why talking boards emerged when they did - not as an ancient practice, but as a modern interface.
Human condition - It suggests that the ideomotor effect opens a channel that was previously unavailable.
Epistemology - It raises the question: What is this third voicing? And how do we investigate it without assuming supernaturalism?

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Yes, even those of us who have a basic understanding of the non-conscious parts of our minds, still seem to think of “me” as their conscious minds (only). It’s all the same mind, only parts of it are not consciously accessible to introspection. So I agree, “they are me”. :+1:

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23

Yeah, it’s a difficult truth to internalize, but even that difficulty makes sense.

Imagine that we are a machine trying to survive in the world, and one day we come up with the idea of taking a part of ourselves and making an independent agent—to observe and decide and act in the world.

We would want to make that actor experience itself as standing alone, as an agent, rather than being an integrated part of us. If the actor had access to the rest of us, it would only confuse him. He’s got enough to deal with.

So the ego gets shoved onstage, but the rest of us are still here.

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24

The same results as this method can be achieved by spontaneous association and self-talk. Ask yourself a question and let the words bubble to the surface. Figure out where the subconscious ends. I love the sigil approach but it’s a lot of work.

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It’s an interesting topic to study. I caught a few vids on Jung while web-surfing. It’s a complex network of ideas. His archetypes seem to be well-received. I didn’t know that occultism was part of the landscape.

:+1:

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Yes it is a lot of work.
The difference in approaches may be akin to digging a garden and planting the seed and eventually harvesting a crop, vs ploughing a field planting the seed and eventually harvesting a crop.

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What also is of interest to me are the events leading up to my eventually waking up one morning and deciding to create a talking board and how those events connect with the way in which I then worked with and established such a connection and communion with the voicing coming through said device.

Specifically, from the age of 21 onwards I enter a phase in my life experience where I purposefully stepped away from the security of income - partly because of a recession which made me unemployed and partly because of my beliefs about and distrust in that that system which made such provision possible I made a choice which saw me homeless and I used the time to go on the road and trust in “God” for provision (providence) and therein observed first hand the synchronicity of events unfolding on a daily basis which came together and helped me - not only to survive but also to connect with this invisible field which not only appeared to see my situation but to have a hand in unfolding events to serve me re my needs.

This in turn lead me to understand that more was happening than the simple explanation that my own single brain-mind was responsible for the integration of both internal and external fields.

Rather, something else was happening. I was integrating with a far vaster conscious field than my own internal “chatter” , or for that matter the external voices of fellow humans.

I may away from the internet for a week, as I am off to bury my mother.

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So sorry. See you when you get back. :+1:

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WhoKnows initiates a discussion on the “ideomotor effect,” aiming to ground supernatural phenomena like Ouija boards in science and personal experience rather than viewing them as evil or purely supernatural. They share a detailed account of using custom-made “talking boards” to communicate with entities such as “Amy,” “William,” and a hybrid alien named “Avet,” who identified as a sentient planetary consciousness. WhoKnows proposes three explanations for these coherent messages: they originate from the user’s subconscious, a universal field of intelligence, or a combination of both.

Scorpion introduces concepts like “ietsism” and spiritualism, contrasting them with scientism. Banno expresses skepticism, attributing the phenomena to confirmation bias and the ideomotor effect driven by psychological expectations. BestGuessYet challenges WhoKnows to provide falsifiable criteria for the subconscious explanation, while PatternChaser and BestGuessYet agree that the subconscious is simply an integrated part of the self, not an external entity.

WhoKnows argues that while psychology explains the mechanism, it does not fully explain why the messages are coherent or predictive, suggesting the ideomotor effect opens a channel to a “third unknown voicing.” They emphasize that their custom devices acted as a form of blind test, preventing users from relying on memory of the board’s layout. WhoKnows concludes by linking their interest in these phenomena to a personal history of trusting in providence and synchronicity, suggesting an integration with a vast conscious field beyond individual cognition. The thread ends with PatternChaser offering condolences as WhoKnows takes a break for a funeral.

Summarized with AI on Aug 27

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Extending this, we can argue then that everyone is “me”. Or is the external world somehow following a different set of “rules” re this idea?

Also, what is meant by “non conscious” and how is this enabled to act consciously, if one is to argue that this is one of its attributes?

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Hey, Whoknows, I hope things went as well as they could with the funeral business.

When you say the messages are coherent, that seems like normal psychology to me. I would expect it. But predictive seems different. Can you give examples?

Sorry if you’ve done that and I’ve missed it.

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Hi Best Guess Yet.

The funeral business is theartre.
Mum’s body up and died as all bodies eventually will do.
Still, the phycology of the fallout was interesting to observe close up and personal with the sibs.
My part of the theatre was to smile knowingly and laugh a lot. Keep it real.
We all live on the edge of each other. That’s a fact.

:slight_smile:

“Normal phycology”…is that even a thing?

“predictive” has to do with the lead up which I posted a little about. The “predictive” is recognised in hindsight and requires a whole bunch of examples collectively before one can ascertain with a type of certainty which metres over faith but appears to support hope.

It is in the “how” the messages are compiled and what can be seen in their stacking - because every message is ongoing from every other and can point back to moments years ago and yesterday and provide therein yet another piece of evidence belonging to the collective unfolding of both my personal subjective experience and the collective of subjective experiences, all rolled into the theatre we sometime refer to as “life” (at least hereabouts).

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Yes. We are all ultimately alone. The best we can do, I think, is remain open and understanding toward all those freaking crazies around us. :smiley:

I mean that the guys in the back room are always offering us coherent wording.

My dreams are considerably reduced now, but the other night, I had one.

My bedmate was lying beside me talking as if lecturing. It was a sophisticated speech, a way impossible for that person to speak in real life.

I can’t remember the words. I can only remember feeling confused that it was so eloquent, so rational, and yet coming from a person who could never speak that way.

Some people hear voices which no one else hears, and those voices often say reasonable things–not necessarily incoherent things.

Well, I have a bad case of recursive thinking. I often sit and examine the past, making sense of it, building a story which makes sense to me. That is the historian BGY.

Do you think that’s substantially different from your experiences?

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Not alone in anything other than our subjective experience. Even then, it is not “lonely” for me because I have myself.

I am all for reasonable, however that might approach…

One of my sibs does this - fills in the blanks based on whatever limited knowledge is obtained…not so much joining the dots as filling the gaps…

A story stitched together in linear format…the future is a fog, the past - more often than not - interpreted in a fashion that tries to make sense of the individuals subjective experience.

THe idea is not to elaborate, exaggerate, place stuff in which didn’t actually happen (but might be placements to “help” one make more sense of it) being aware of those tendencies so that they are not fudging the results.

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We can? Conventionally, a human being has two ‘parts’, physical (body) and non-physical (mind). And I agree that we are each and all parts of something bigger too. But I don’t see how my description of the mind having two parts, leads directly to this…?

As above, I can’t see how this follows?

To me, “non-conscious” means that part of the mind which is not available for conscious introspection and examination.

How is WHAT “enabled to act”?

And this just contributes to my confusion.

Can you set me straight?

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And from me too. :+1: :upside_down_face:

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37

Jung was not, by a current understanding of the term, an empirical scientist. One can decide for themselves where to place him in the cannon of psychological groundbreakers, but it’s problematic to take something like his beliefs about the paranormal at face-value. We can also lionize Aristotle, rightly so, for the part he has in the history of natural philosophy and science, yet he believed that women had fewer teeth than men, and giving any level of credibility to that is flatly insane. In this context, Jung’s beliefs are no more relevant than anyone else’s. Learning such beliefs isn’t studying the science about allegedly paranormal effects, it’s studying the history of paranormal beliefs.

What does this mean? As a rule, the point of science is to extract the biasing effect of “personal experience” from the equation. It is an attempt to make observations that aren’t “personal”, but are rather “public” and “verifiable” and “reproduceable”. These two goals seem inherently at odds.

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To be clear, I don’t fill in factual gaps. Not consciously, anyway. I am interested in understanding the world as it is. I mean that I spend time thinking about events and people from earlier in my life, trying to make sense of things which didn’t make sense at the time.

Building a narrative which better explains what happened.

It’s what every historian does. I think we all do it.

Alas, in my conception, the guys in the back room are always along for the ride. As the narrator is consciously building a worldview, they are also there, assuring the narrator that things make sense, no matter what the narrator has worked out.

They are the ones who control the button labeled ‘Certain’.

So my only move is to aggressively engage others. I don’t mean hostilely. I mean that if I see a question as dumb or off-topic or outright nuts, I will answer it anyway. No matter what story my unconscious is feeding me about the stupidity of the question, my narrator will overrule them and answer it anyway, as honestly and openly as I’m able.

There are limits, of course. One time I engaged a debater who sent me twenty nutty questions every time she posted to me. I told her she could ask any three questions she liked, and I would answer them honestly. Then I would ask her three questions and she would answer honestly.

She declined.

In my opinion, that’s because the guys in her back room were sending up DANGER signals to her narrator.

I’m saying that we can’t simply determine to be objective—because the guys will just say, “Yep. You’re objective now.”

We have to use behavioral workarounds to aim in the direction of objectivity.

It’s similar to how the scientific method arose, I think.

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Just came back from a video that pokes fun at occultism - the ridiculousness of it strikes you when you see games as Satanic, teaching children sorcery, casting spells and all. By that token many bestsellers are Satanic initiations.

Occultism though is an anthropologically interesting subject. Surely there are academic dissertations on them. That would be a good place to start.

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[quote=“PatternChaser, post:35, topic:2610”]

We can? Conventionally, a human being has two ‘parts’, physical (body) and non-physical (mind)

Believing something in a traditional, ordinary way that follows accepted social customs or general rules may be convenient, but where has it been established that there are two separate “parts” one being physical and one being “non” physical?

Okay.

To me non conscious means “not conscious of” but what examples can you give re “that part of the mind” that establishes it is “not available for conscious introspection and examination”?

The “guys in the back room”…