I think it's towards the end of this interview, but I seem to recall this professor talking about doing double and triple blind tests on a bunch of
purported psychics where many of them did in fact demonstrate extra-normal abilities.
www.theparacast.com...
Out of curiosity I've tried out a handful of psychics/mediums. A couple of them genuinely knew things that weren't possible for them to know and
left me scratching my head, others were pretty much crap and a waste of money.
Is there more to the world than our concrete jungles and animated square boxes with screens? Probably. Are all those monks in the mountains spending
their entire lives being brain-dead dullards without cable TV, or are they doing something else? If there is something to the topic of meditation and
all the esoteric subjects that spring from it, it may not be a McDonalds fast-food type of endeavor otherwise everyone would be doing it.
Now if you're on the Dawkins train of thought and think that our consciousness is basically an illusion of our sensory input then there's not really
any reason to delve further, nor would you be expected to credit anything that can't be replicated and measured.
There's tons of books out there on the topic of meditation, inner realms, and the like. No clue at all which ones are accurate and which ones
aren't.
In my meditative experience it has seemed that effort defeats itself. Trying to make something happen has never yielded any interesting results. Your
mind isn't truly quiet if your talking voice in your head is ruminating over how to do something. Stop trying so hard, turn off the talking voice
(actually harder than it sounds), practice regularly, and be patient IMO.
