Asd and psychic tendencies.

Post Reply New Topic

I hope they can get the glitches (double/triple posts) out soon.

Can some kind mod please clean up the repetitive mess I just made with Windows 8 and the "submit" button?? Sorry about that.

Additional comment: Tarot IS real. Absolutely real. Just not in the way that we usually think of it.

What's real IS NOT that "The Cards" can tell your future, or contact your dead dear ones, or see through the ethers to what's really going on in someone else's head.

It's that all of them represent things that are going on in our hearts and minds all the time. That's why each card in the Major Arcana has about a dozen somewhat vague meanings. That's why the Minor Arcana detail different aspects of the three things we do with our minds and the basically one thing (doing/getting) we do with our bodies. Sitting down with the Tarot deck is an exercise in focused meditation-- it gets you consciously thinking about what is unconscious. That's all, but that's not nothing. It's quite a bit.

More sleight of mind. It can be a good trick that helps you focus on stuff you ordinarily would not think about or know how to think about. It can be a good trick that provides a visual cue and slots some words and metaphors for what you have trouble verbalizing.

Or it can be a bad trick that lets someone write their pathologies onto your life, all the while calling it a Message From The Beyond. Or a bad trick that lets someone who's better at psychological prestidigitation than you are use you, manipulate you, and separate a fool from his money.

"Sleight of mind" doesn't mean that it's stupid, bad, foolish, or useless. Hell, CBT is sleight of mind. DBA is, in some ways, sleight of mind. Both of them amount to "changing how you think," "changing how you think about what you're thinking," and/or "changing how you think about what you're doing." Talk therapy is sleight of mind. People pay $250 an hour for someone to help them perform sleight of mind, to teach them how to bend their thoughts like a fork at a psychic carnival into a channel that makes their life more functional and less screwed up.

Sleight of mind can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how it's used, whether you're aware of it, whether you're willing to apply some ethics to where you lead someone else's thoughts, and whether you're willing to own it and take some responsibility for where your mind goes.

Look up Carl Jung and have a field day. This guy and Freud should have got together, had a cigar that was just a cigar, drank a lot of beer that was just beer, stuffed BF Skinner in a black box, and written us some better psychology books.

Put another way--

Aw, hell, Fnord. Pull out the cards and give them the affirmation, the validation, and the sounding post they're looking for.

And then, just because decent people like to feel that they're giving something back, let them take you out to dinner, or help figure out what's wrong with your vehicle, or remember to use them as a sounding post sometime when you're stuck.

Don't take something they can't afford to spend (time, money, energy, whatever).

And don't invest your time and energy in someone who asks, and asks, and asks, and doesn't think or make any attempt to replace their divot.

You see, here's the issue at heart: Claims are being made for an alleged phenomenon for which no predictive or empirical evidence exists.

By 'empirical', I mean repeatable and consistently demonstrable.

By 'predictive', I mean that there is no empirical data from which to derive a proper mathematical or statistical rule that would predict that the alleged phenomenon. For instance, the Higgs boson was first predicted, then discovered by controlled experimentation. A Royal Flush is also predicted by statistical analysis to have a 1 in 649,744 chance of being dealt to a 5-card hand. This is also repeatable and consistently demonstrable, given enough 5-cards deals from a normal 52-card deck.

Where the wooists make their biggest mistake is in citing statistics erroneously by: (1) Selective memory or confirmation bias in collating their data; (2) Assuming that a positive data set that is obviously insignificant when compared to random chance is somehow significant for their claims.

As for that last one, the odds of correctly guessing a randomly-drawn Zener card is 1 in 25 (20%) on the first draw. Some have claimed that a verified success rate of 0.002% or less is proof positive of 'psychic' ability. Such people have no real concept of statistical analysis and how to implement it.

Real statistical analysis is predictive. That's why insurance companies rely so heavily upon actuarial tables that predict how people under certain conditions will likely behave.

And why people running the psychic con rely on those same tables to make their 'predictions' regarding what people are likely to do, as well.

I think that pattern detection works on all sorts of levels of experience, not just in the conscious mind. And this may operate as quite an extreme gift for some on the spectrum. No-one has ever done studies (as far as I know) on the possible correlation between gifted pattern detectors and the ability to perceive "extrasensory" events.. I think the psychic nomenclature has been demonised by hardline positivists and the conversation about latent abilities needs to take place with a whole new vocabulary really. Every time someone raises this, the anti responses are very predictable; there isn't a lot of fresh thinking though it is desperately needed.

I think there are some people that are gifted in picking up on other people's emotions.

I also think there are some gifted people who think in terms of abstract metaphors who may gain some value out of reframing things in terms of psychic phenomena.

I don't believe that there is a type of psychic ability that can predict the next lotto numbers though.

This is my view.

I do it professionally. Really. I'm the reader/adviser in my little town. I'm usually called the "Hoodoo woman" though. I'm a housewife, but I do have a few clients a month, at least. The Baptists who come to my house always bring a Bible and tell people they were there to witness to me. I don't tell on them. I also know tons of secrets about half the town, but I never tell them. I know that a lot of the ones who do it are fake, and I don't believe in every aspect of the supernatural either. I'm as big a skeptic of some of it as Fnord is of all of it

I learned what I know because my grandmother was the Hoodoo woman in our part of Birmingham when I was growing up. She learned it growing up from the Geechee lady who worked for her mother who basically raised them. My mother never had any interest in learning about any of that and I did, so she taught me what she knew. I mainly do readings - cards (playing cards are what I like, although I can read tarot, but I don't find that I get as much information) palms, and yes I have a crystal ball and know how to use it, and I do spells for people. The spells I do are usually Hoodoo or sometimes Witchcraft, and occasionally Santeria and Voodoo. It actually does work more times than not. It's also not like some instant thing where I can have anything I want if I do a spell.

I also don't get offended if somebody doesn't believe in it. It doesn't bother me either way.

_________________
I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com