Extrasensory Situational Awareness

[Doc Stier]

[Shooter]

[Doc Stier]

[Doc Stier]

[Doc Stier]

It's easy to understand why much of what has been presented in this thread may seem to be nebulous and vague to many readers, particularly those with a decidedly narrow perspective, who insisted from the beginning that the basic premise of ESA has no validity and no value in martial art training whatsoever. It was also stated by such individuals that this topic was of no interest to anyone here in any event. That has clearly proven to not be the case.

The fact remains that everyday people of all varieties around the globe find themselves suddenly facing life threatening, emergency situations which they obviously didn't see coming until it was too late. If you are one of the fortunate few who has never been caught unaware in such circumstances, count your blessings. Your sheltered existence is the exception, rather than the norm.

At some point in life, nearly everyone experiences the unexpected misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, oftentimes resulting in serious injury or potential death from a freak accident or a totally unprovoked personal assault. It happens everywhere, from large urban communities to small towns, without any warning of impending danger which the average person would ordinarily be alerted to via their usual physical sense perceptions. They don't see, hear or smell anything to warn them in advance of the event. As a result, their conscious awareness of the imminent danger is virtually non-existent and their physical reactions, if any at all, are too slow to be effective.

This is never a good scenario, no matter who you are or where you are. And it almost always ends badly for those who are completely caught off guard in this way.

But it will never happen to you, though, because of your military or martial art experience, which of course makes you a world class fighter, right? Or because you carry a concealed handgun or other deadly weapon, right? Sadly, the statistics of public record don't validate those beliefs.

Quite the contrary, it's clearly apparent that even those people who are reasonably expected to be more aware of their surroundings and more effective in their responses, often don't perform well in these unexpected situations. It remains a mystery, therefore, why so many people close their minds to the possibility and necessity of developing something more keen physical senses to detect potential threats or dangers in their immediate environment. Really? Seriously? Isn't it better to have skills and abilities that may never be needed, than to suddenly need them someday, but not have them?

[Doc Stier]

THE OPERATIONAL POTENTIAL OF SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION

Richard Gafford

Perception is demonstrated to have occurred below the threshold of conscious sensory experience when a person responds to a stimulus too weak in intensity or too short in duration for him to be aware of it. Individual behavior without awareness of the stimulus, of which subliminal perception is a subtype, has been a subject of study in psychological laboratories for at least 70 years, and a great deal of technical data has been collected on the subject. Recently it has been associated with some theories of depth analysis and popularized for possible commercial exploitation by the advertising world.

In the most sensational of these popularized experiments, an increase in popcorn sales in a New Jersey movie theater is said to have been stimulated by subliminal interruptions of the feature film with an advertisement urging the patrons to buy popcorn. The exposure time used, a small fraction of a second, was too brief for conscious discrimination by an observer absorbed in the film story but presumably long enough to have some stimulating effect. The advertising men who are currently interested in this phenomenon as a sales technique argue that the short-duration stimulus appeals to a positive motive, for example an appetite for popcorn, without arousing the rational, conscious sales-resistance of the individual, based perhaps on the desire to save money or lose weight.

The argument becomes more complicated with respect to a product which there is no specific preexisting positive motive to acquire. The appeal is now said to be directed to a "deep" underlying motive presumed to be always operating, never satiated, say the sex drive. The masked stimulus arouses some aspect of this ubiquitous sex drive, a drive which can hardly be directly satiated in polite society and one of which the conscious recognition is more or less anxiety-producing. The vague discomfort the individual feels as a result of subconscious stimulation must be allayed by some associated gratification, and this gratification - the advertiser hopes - is the socially acceptable acquisition of the product which he is trying to promote.

It is evident that there are several mighty leaps in logic in the advertising man's argument, and a great many places where his scheme can go astray. He has taken several psychological phenomena which have been demonstrated to a limited degree in controlled laboratory experiments and strung them together into an appealing argument for a "technique." Because part of what he is promoting is supported by laboratory data, however, it has enough status to warrant serious attention.

The operational potential of other techniques for stimulating a person to take a specific controlled action without his being aware of the stimulus, or the source of stimulation, has in the past caught the attention of imaginative intelligence officers. Interest in the operational potential of subliminal perception has precedent in serious consideration of the techniques of hypnosis, extrasensory perception, and various forms of conditioning. By each of these techniques, it has been demonstrated, certain individuals can at certain times and under certain circumstances be influenced to act abnormally without awareness of the influence or at least without antagonism.

After careful research on each of these methods, however, it has become apparent that although they occasionally produce dramatic results, their lack of reliability and their requirement for extremely precise controls to obtain the desired effect have limited their operational utility to a very few very specialized instances -situations where just the right persons can be put together at just the right moment under closely controlled circumstances. The primary danger observed in connection with this unreliability is that of a "flashback," of inadvertently producing just the opposite effect to that desired. Subliminal perception as a practical control or persuasion technique is prone to the same difficulties.

There are four principal categories of behavior without awareness.

The individual may be unaware of:

a) his behavior itself.

He may be whispering without realizing he is whispering, or he may be moving into a trap without knowing that the trap is there. A special case here is abnormal behavior in which the individual fails to realize what he is doing because his normal awareness and self-control have been interrupted by disturbing agents such as fear, anxiety, illness, drugs, or hypnotic suggestion.

b) the relation of his behavior to some stimulus.

The individual may be unaware of the fact that his interrogator is influencing him by saying "Right" after certain statements and by remaining noncommittal after others. The process called "operant conditioning" falls into this category.

c) the stimulus itself, because of its slight impact.

The individual may be unaware of a very faint sound or a quick flash of light, unaware in the sense that he lacks the usual visual sensations. Subliminal perception falls into this category.

d) the precise nature of the stimulus, as well as its relation to his behavior, because of inattention.

The individual may be aware of vague sensations, but he is not aware either of the source or of the significant content of the stimulation, although his behavior may change in accordance with changes in the stimulus. This category includes a great deal of perceptual activity affecting ordinary social behavior. A person is often unaware of the specific cues and clues to which he is reacting not because the stimulus is insufficient to reach the consciousness but because the effort to be fully aware of all the cues all the time would create too great a cognitive strain.

In persuading a person to do something he normally or rationally would resist doing an intelligence operative can make use of any one of these categories of psychological processes. Usually the purpose is to produce behavior of which the individual is unaware. The use of subliminal perception, on the other hand, is a device to keep him unaware of the source of his stimulation. The desire here is not to keep him unaware of what he is doing, but rather to keep him unaware of why he is doing it, by masking the external cue or message with subliminal presentation and so stimulating an unrecognized motive.

In order to develop the subliminal perception process for use as a reliable operational technique, it would be necessary a) to define the composition of a subliminal cue or message which will trigger an appropriate preexisting motive, b) to determine the limits of intensity between which this stimulus is effective but not consciously perceived, c) to determine what preexisting motive will produce the desired abnormal action and under what conditions it is operative, and d) to overcome the defenses aroused by consciousness of the action itself.

As to the composition of the subliminal cue, it cannot be supposed that just any message presented close below the threshold of recognition will be translated into appropriate action. The determination of the right kind of message in terms of content, number and type of words or symbols, grouping of symbols, and so forth has been the object of a great deal of psychological experiment. There is a good deal of lore and a few rather vague principles available, but generally they concern rather trivial areas of action from the viewpoint of the intelligence operative. Since the effectiveness of the procedure depends on not arousing the person's defense mechanisms, and since defense mechanisms are not only peculiar to each individual but hard to discover, it is difficult to specify even what is to be avoided in the composition of the subliminal cue in order not to arouse the defenses.

Thresholds of recognition are variable and difficult to determine. If the intensity of the stimulus is much below an individual's threshold it doesn't get through to even the most automatic areas of his sensorium. But recognition thresholds vary tremendously, not only among individuals, but also in the same individual from one time to another, in accordance with his physical situation, his physiological condition, and above all the degree to which he is psychologically attuned to the particular content of the message. A normal human being is an infinitely more complex receiving instrument than any electronic gadget, and adjusting a stimulus for such a variable receiver is difficult. In most of the laboratory studies on which the current theory of subliminal perception is based 1 there has been a long pretrial period requiring the subject's full cooperation to zero him in on the subliminal signal. Such preparation is clearly not feasible for operational use. The message must therefore be transmitted on a much wider intensity band and may frequently not get through or may on the other hand penetrate to the subject's consciousness and arouse his defenses.

The message once received is presumed to trigger some sensitive subconscious motivation to action. There are numerous psychological theories about such inner functions, but little definitely known about them. If a somewhat homogeneous sample of people is tested a number of times, most of them will be sensitive most of the time to the subliminal cue; but some individuals, for a great variety of reasons we can little more than guess at, will be insensitive. In this minority of instances the individual may do nothing, may do something trivial and irrelevant, or may do the exact opposite of what was intended.

If the subliminal cue is to work by tripping off an existing motive to action, one must know what motives are positive and operant at the moment. The obvious basic drives (e.g. hunger, sex) are sometimes satiated and sometimes subordinated. With a great deal of knowledge about the individual, some predictability can be attained, but it is still a matter of probabilities. The percentage of instances will be high where the opposite motive to that desired will be tripped off.

There appears thus to be such a myriad of factors that even the most simplified empirical tests carried out with the best possible cooperation of the subjects are rarely marked by really significant reliability. Furthermore, with such a large number of variables and relatively low reliability, it is difficult to determine whether the controlled variable or uncontrolled artifacts are producing whatever results one does observe.

Finally, the subliminal device to avoid alerting an individual's defenses by masking the cue and the basic motive does not cover the effect of awareness of the resultant abnormal action itself, with its implications and consequences. Assuming that one could persuade to such action by presenting a cue subliminally, there is no way of effecting the action without awareness and without tripping off defenses and rational resistance. It must be concluded that there are so many elusive variables and so many sources of irregularity in the device of directing subliminal messages to a target individual that its operational feasibility is exceedingly limited.

1 For specifications and data see "Handbook of Experimental Psychology," S. S. Stevens (ed).

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol2no2/html/v02i2a07p_0001.htm

[Doc Stier]

The following excerpt from the full linked article below is of relevant interest to any individual who wishes to develop and maintain optimum situational awareness and efficiency of response in the course of daily travels and activities:

"The ability to respond quickly and appropriately to signs of threat or danger is essential for many occupations. Military jet pilots, police personnel, air traffic controllers, public transport drivers, even laboratory inspectors of potentially malignant cell samples, must all be able to respond readily to signs of danger, even when under considerable stress. The inappropriate reaction could be costly, both in terms of money and lives."

http://www.koestler-parapsychology.psy.ed.ac.uk/cwatt/Documents/wattmorris.pdf

[Doc Stier]

Among the greatest impediments to every type of situational awareness these days are the many electronic media devices such as smart phones, i-pads, nooks, kindle e-readers, and the like, which so many people use while driving their cars, while riding trains and buses, while walking down the sidewalk, or while waiting for someone or something everywhere, totally oblivious to everyone and everything around them.

It's virtually impossible to employ effective sensory perceptions, or to retain a sufficiently calm state of mind to allow extrasensory awareness, when constantly distracted by the use of these devices. At the very least, you should look around from time to time, perhaps check your six now and again, in order to note whether or not something wicked this way comes. Becoming completely absorbed in your Facebook page, your texting, or your e-reader when out in public puts you at a much higher risk of not noticing potential threats until they're already upon you, and certainly makes you a more desirable and easier target for the criminally inclined.

Choose to go an entire week without texting or talking on your phone or using any other electronic devices when you are anywhere that you would reasonably expect to need alert awareness of your surroundings. If nothing else, you'll be surprised by how much you're normally missing by not doing so.

[Darthwing Teorist]

Yes, I only listen to music in public or read (books or ereader) when I feel safe. As a rule of thumb when I walk I remove my earphones and obviously don't read in the street. Once in the bus or in the subway station, I can let myself relax. It depends also where I am and if I know the bus to be safe or not.

[Shooter]

But if you have the deep skills acquired from discipline and devoted practice tapping into your esa, you should be able to read your surroundings no matter the volume of extraneous stimulae you find yourself in amongst.

[Shooter]

This is where Gary's credibility dropped off the screen over here - from Page-18:

Hypersensitivity and madness are both the products of an undisciplined, delusional state of mind, not the result of natural, normal intuitive awareness.

Fearless meditative investigation of one's deepest mental processes, and the continual modifications of consciousness manifested by such processes, eventually generates a mental state of self-realization which eliminates hypersensitivity and prevents insanity.

It'd be nice to come back to this post at least in an attempt to frame the rest of the tripe which has followed since.

Schizophrenia and other legitimate illnesses, brain injuries and barnyard diagnoses from the feeding trough of generalities aside, it'd be nice to know what types of 'insanity' are being referred to here? Asking rhetorically, of course.

[Doc Stier]

Shooter:

With all due respect for your biased opinions, if the material presented in this thread topic is of no real interest to you, aside from a desire to debunk it, lacks credibility from your point of view, or you simply don't like me, please feel free to not read these pages and please refrain from posting your negative commentary.

It's a well known fact that those who suffer from "schizophrenia and other legitimate (mental) illnesses, brain injuries" or various "types of insanity" are generally reluctant or unable to admit that they have a problem, and are thus unwilling or incapable of employing any means of self-help which require a conscious, self-disciplined effort in behalf of their own personal well-being. As such, they are not likely to pursue a regular meditation practice or the use of other techniques which could potentially improve their ongoing state of mental illness, or even be capable of generating any positive change in a condition resulting from permanent brain injury. Sadly, such individuals are also usually incapable, therefore, of achieving any success with the means and methods described in this thread.

I certainly hope it has been clear to most readers of this topic that the ideas and methods presented for consideration here are only of value to individuals approaching the material from the starting point of a reasonably normal overall state of physical and mental health, since anything substantially less than that usually focuses habitual personal attention on sub-ordinary situational awareness and experience, rather than on any possible consideration of extra-ordinary situational awareness and experience.

[Shooter]

Well, that's why I asked rhetorically as I knew the question wouldn't be addressed. Are you so full of your own biases to even notice that I asked a question?

I'd just like to know what kinds of insanity and 'madness' are being referred to in the post I quoted because what you're suggesting there, in plain text, is completely delusional in its own right - zero credibility.

It has nothing to do with whether or not I like you, or my so-called 'biases'.

[Doc Stier]

Fair enough, Shooter.. Please note, however, that I Iinitially ignored your baiting question and insults because I have zero desire to engage you in any antagonistic argument or flaming debate, OK? Again, I respect your right to disagree with anything posted here, as you wish. It's all good.

To address your question, I wasn't referring to any specifically diagnosed mental diseases or conditions whatsovever, but was merely offering my own personal observations and opinion regarding meditation training. Nothing more was intended or meant to be implied, as I am neither a Psychiatrist nor a Clinical Psychologist, but simply a longtime meditator and student of the mind.

I am certainly interested, though, in knowing the views of anyone here who does work in those fields professionally.

[Doc Stier]

THOUGHT TRANSFERENCE
2008 by 18mind

ALMOST everyone now-a-days is anxious to practise thought-transference, and dreams of the delights of communicating with an absent friend without the assistance of telegraph or post. Many people seem to think that they can accomplish the task with very little effort, and are quite surprised when they meet with total failure in their attempts. Yet it is clear that one must be able to think ere one can transfer thought, and some power of steady thinking must be necessary in order to send a thought-current through space. The feeble vacillating thoughts of the majority of people cause mere flickering vibrations in the thought-atmosphere, appearing and vanishing minute by minute, giving rise to no definite form and endowed with the lowest vitality. A thought-form must be clearly cut and well vitalised if it is to be driven in any definite direction, and to be strong enough, on arriving at its destination, to set up there a reproduction of itself.

There are two methods of thought-transference, one which may be distinguished - as physical, the other as psychical, one, belonging to the brain as well as the mind, the other to the mind only. A thought may be generated by the consciousness, cause vibration in the mental body, then in the astral body, set up waves in the etheric, and then in the dense molecules of the physical brain; by these brain vibrations the physical ether is affected, and the waves pass outwards, till they reach another brain and set up vibrations in its dense and etheric parts. By that receiving brain vibrations are caused in the astral and then in the mental bodies attached to it, and the vibrations in the mental body draw out the answering quiver in consciousness. Such are the many stages of the arc traversed by a thought. But this traversing of a " loopline " is not necessary. The consciousness may, when causing vibrations in its mental body, direct those vibrations straight to the mental body of the receiving consciousness, thus avoiding the round just described.

Let us see what happens in the first case.

There is a small organ in the brain, the pineal gland, the function of which is unknown to Western physiologists, and with which Western psychologists do not concern themselves. It is a rudimentary organ in most people, but it is evolving, not retrograding, and it is possible to quicken its evolution into a condition in which it can perform its proper function, the function that, in the future, it will discharge in all. It is the organ for thought-transference, as much as the eye is the organ of vision or the ear of hearing.

If anyone thinks very intently on a single idea, with concentration and sustained attention, he will become conscious of a slight quiver or creeping feeling—it has been compared to the creeping of an ant—in the pineal gland. The quiver takes place in the ether which permeates the gland, and causes a slight magnetic current which gives rise to the creeping feeling in the dense molecules of the gland. If the thought be strong enough to cause the current, then the thinker knows that he has been successful in bringing his thought to a pointedness and a strength which render it capable of transmission.

That vibration in the ether of the pineal gland sets up waves in the surrounding ether, like waves of light, only much smaller and more rapid. These undulations pass out in all directions, setting the ether in motion, and these etheric waves, in turn, produce undulations in the ether of the pineal gland in another brain, and from that are transmitted to the astral and mental bodies in regular succession, thus reaching the consciousness. If this second pineal gland cannot reproduce these undulations, then the thought will pass unnoticed, making no impressions, any more than waves of light make an impression on the eye of a blind person.

In the second method of thought-transference, the thinker, having created a thought-form on his own plane, does not send it down to the brain, but directs it immediately to another thinker on the mental plane. The power to do this deliberately implies a far higher mental evolution than does the physical method of thought-transference, for the sender must be self-conscious on the mental plane in order to exercise knowingly this activity.

But this power is being continually exercised by everyone of us indirectly and unconsciously, since all our thinkings cause vibrations in the mental body, that must, from the nature of things, be propagated through the surrounding mind-stuff. And there is no reason to confine the word thought-transference to conscious and deliberate transmissions of a particular thought from one person to another. We are all continually affecting each other by these waves of thought, sent out without definite intent, and what is called public opinion is largely created in this way. Most people think along certain lines, not because they have carefully thought a question out and come to a conclusion, but because large numbers of people are thinking along those lines, and carry others with them. The strong thought of a great thinker goes out into the world of thought, and is caught up by receptive and responsive minds. They reproduce his vibrations, and thus strengthen the thought-wave, affecting others who would have remained unresponsive to the original undulations. These, answering again, give added force to the waves, and they become still stronger, affecting large masses of people.

Public opinion, once formed, exercises a dominant way over the minds of the great majority, beating unceasingly on all brains and awakening in them responsive undulations.

There are also certain national ways of thinking, definite and deeply cut channels, resulting from the continual reproduction during centuries of similar thoughts, arising from the history, the struggles, the customs of a nation. These profoundly modify and colour all minds born into the nation, and everything that comes from outside the nation is changed by the national vibration-rate. As thoughts that come to us from the outer world are modified by our mental bodies, and when we receive them we receive their vibrations plus our own normal vibrations—a resultant—so do nations, receiving impressions from other nations, receive them as modified by their own national vibration-rate. Hence the Englishman and the Frenchman, the Indian and the African, see the same facts, but add to them their own existing prepossessions, and quite honestly accuse each other of falsifying the facts and practising unfair methods. If this truth, and its inevitableness, were recognised, many international quarrels would be smoothed more easily than is now the case, many wars would be avoided, and those waged would be more easily put an end to. Then each nation would recognise what is sometimes called " the personal equation", and instead of blaming the other for difference of opinion, each would seek the mean between the two views, neither insisting wholly on its own.

The very practical question for the individual that arises from the knowledge of this continual and general thought-transference, is: How much can I gain of good, and avoid of evil, seeing that I must live in a mixed atmosphere, wherein good and evil thought-waves are ever active and are beating against my brain ? How can I guard myself against injurious thought-transference, and how can I profit by the beneficial ? The knowledge of the way in which the selective power works is of vital importance.

Each man is the person who most constantly affects his own mental body. Others affect it occasionally, but he always. The speaker to whom he listens, the author whose book he reads, affect his mental body. But they are incidents in his life; he is a permanent factor. His own influence over the composition of the mental body is far stronger than that of anyone else, and he himself fixes the normal vibration-rate of his mind. Thoughts which do not harmonise with that rate will be flung aside when they touch the mind. If a man thinks truth, a lie cannot make a lodgment in his mind; if he thinks love, hate cannot disturb him; if he thinks wisdom, ignorance cannot paralyse him. Here alone is safety, here real power. The mind must not be allowed to lie as it were fallow, for then any thought-seed may take root and grow; it must not be allowed to vibrate as it pleases, for that means that it will answer to any passing vibration.

There lies the practical lesson. The man that practises it will soon find its value, and will discover that by thinking, life can be made nobler and happier, and that it is true that by wisdom we can put an end to pain.