February 28, 2011
Atlantis Rising
521 S. 8th St.
Ste A
P. O. Box
441 Livingston, MT 59047
Sir:
I read with interest “Feeling the Future,” Robert Shoch, #86 page 6. That suggests studying after a test can improve one’s score on a test already taken. If one is willing to suppose that the future influences the present, then there is no reason to think that the past influences the present; causality may all go the other way. In fact it works a little better, since if cause exists, the results of the cause are known if the cause itself is. We cannot predict the future, but we are reasonably secure in our belief that the past is immutable.
Before going on let me explain how deep is my skepticism of almost everything. My own work, struggling against the prejudice against marrying cousins, has influenced me. The prejudice entails a fertility penalty. Were there anything to psychic powers then I would have the spirits of a billion unborn, the anguish of the billion woman who would have given the work of their lives to raising those unborn, the tears of a million women who will cry themselves to sleep tonight and the ghosts of a hundred empires that failed for lack of babies. That boost to my work has not been evident. I plan to post my latest proof of principle on nobabies.net on the 18th of this March.
I thought you might like to know about a game we played as children. People now spend a lot of time alone but entertained. We usually were with others and were bored. The game was to pick out a person in a crowd to influence. You could do this alone or with a few friends. We would concentrate our minds on having the target perform some harmless trivial action such as touch an ear or scratch an arm. It was amazing how often this attempted display of mental communication would work. Typically the target seemed to go from repose to restlessness to random gestures until finally performing the required act and then relaxing again.
Of course there was no experimental control. We might well have been picking up clues from the “target” that the scratch was on the way. In other words the target may have been in effect controlling us. But it was sort of fun and seemed harmless enough at the time.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert
There have been 12,071 visitors so far.