John,Andres, on the Explaining the Unexplained thread, pointed me towards this article, but then we both interpreted it differently. On my reading of it Dr Edwin May is saying that he thinks that the methods were flawed which the CIA used in their investigations and report into the remote viewing project, and that they deliberately excluded data and methodologies which would have given positive evidence about the effectiveness of outcomes achieved by remote viewing.
I'd really like you, & Amos, & others to read it and tell me what you think that Dr May is saying because Andres & I couldn't agree on this.
CIA AIR Report on Remote Viewing, Dr. Edwin C. May response, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, Anomalous Cognition Remote Viewing Scientific Research http://www.lfr.org/csl/media/air_mayresponse.shtmlI also wonder whether you are jumping to the point of looking for causes & explanations rather than just doing the experiments to see whether precognitive abilities can be proven. You are worrying about the nature of time and what precognitive abilities might mean for those time theories rather than thinking about how experiments could be designed to investigate these abilities. My suggestion is, work out effective, scientifically controlled data-gathering experiments or studies and worry about the consequences after the data is gathered & analysed.
But, on a personal note, I have to say that time has always been a bit rubbery for me, in the sense that you are referring to it. There can be a number of explanations for that though, in the context of precognition - some psychic, some "ordinary".
I've been thinking about examples to illustrate the difference between what could be erroneously referred to as psychically transmitted or precognitive information and what seems to me to be correctly labelled as that.
Example 1: three days ago I had an overwhelming sense that something disastrous had happened or was going to happen, which I did not yet know about consciously. I tried to analyse it to find the source of the feeling but it didn't yield any more information. Yesterday I discovered that my credit card was missing from my wallet, and by a process of reviewing possibilities I realised that I had probably left it in the ATM (automatic teller machine) about 3 days ago. I think, therefore, that that was the source of this sense of dread & fear. My subconscious knowledge, which I hadn't examined consciously, was pointing out that I had forgotten to do something really important which could have terrible consequences financially.
Example 2: In December 1989 I had gone down to the mainstreet during a mealbreak at work & I was standing waiting for a traffic light to change at the pedestrian crossing. I was suddnely overwhelmed by a a very similar, but much stronger sense of dread & fear. I stood there trying to analyse the source of the fear, and looked around at all of the people nearby and across the road trying to work out whether there was anything wrong.
After using logic & deduction I then tried to analyse it through my psychic abilities. All I could get was that it wasn't any one particular person who was in danger, and it wasn't any one particular spot nearby. It wasn't just one or two people, but everyone who was the target, and then my logical/analytical side started to put forward scenarios, and the nearest I could get to it was that a large event, such as an overturning semi-trailer truck, would affect a lot of people in a very short time.
I tried to analyse the feeling over the next week, but could get no more information.
A week later I was standing at exactly the same spot, waiting to cross the road, (I had not stood on that spot again since the last week until now) but everything had changed for me and everyone around me. The Newcastle (Australia) earthquake had hit that morning, without warning, and with very little documented previous earthquake activity in this area. Everyone in this city was in varying degrees of shock over this earthquake, with some people having lost their houses, and some other people killed or injured.
I suddenly knew what the overwhelming sense of dread & fear had been. A week later I would be standing at exactly the same spot feeling exactly that feeling, for a very good reason.
Example 3: I went to a musical afternoon at a church (I don't go to church very often, but I used to go to this one for a period of about a year, approx. 15 years earlier.) When the congregation sang the well known hymn, How Great Thou Art, I suddenly found myself crying, and I had no idea why. Three months later at my Aunt's funeral the congregation was asked to sing How Great Thou Art and I was crying as I sang it. I had not sung that song for years, nor had any reason to think of it before the first occasion, or between the first & second occasions. Logic and reason gave me no understanding of why this hymn should make me cry but the very next time I had to sing it was when I was crying because of grief at loss of a close relative.
These examples can be analysed and other reasons attributed to the feelings I had on the first occasions, but there is also the possibility that some other process was at work.
Helen