You’ve probably never heard the term; most people haven’t.  A person with a schizotypal personality is basically a highly sensitive person who is also highly creative.  The combination of these two things makes for a potent cocktail.  We have the capacity for genius, but also can be crippled emotionally; We can be sort of like the really fast sports car that’s always in the shop.  As an example let’s take two ordinary people.  Myself, and “Johnny.”  Both of us are about the same age, sensitive, with an artistic nature and pretty intelligent with relatively ordinary lives and fit the description of schizotypal in many ways.  Both of us are self employed handymen.

I own my own home, have a contractor’s license, a B.A. in Spanish, I’ve been married for 25 years and I have a host of other accomplishments including speaking awards, short films I’ve created, artwork I’ve painted, this blog and a few other things.  I am physically healthy and not in therapy.  We have money problems, but this is hardly unusual and by the standards of many, my wife and I are well off.

In contrast, Johnny is sick these days with a spinal infection and has never been able to get his life together.  He retreated into heroin many years ago and has never been able to fully kick the habit and never made anything of himself.  He earns a bit here and a bit there when he can, but relies on the kindness of others basically to get by.  He’s also been in prison.  Why did we end up so differently?  It may come down to this: my father, who is also a fairly sensitive man, passed on an attitude to me of ignoring conventional wisdom and following your gut.  It may have been this simply thing that had given me the toehold that I needed to maintain my sanity.  (I’ll explain this later.)

Psychologists are conflicted about us, with some classifying schizotypal as a mental disease with labels such as fantasy prone personality, Borderline Personality Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and literally a laundry list of other pathological classifications.  Others, by contrast, recognize us as a bona fide personality type.

If ever there was a controversial personality type in psychology, we are it.  This is mostly due to one very important aspect of the schizotypal personality: the presence of a trait that David Ritchey refers to as “Anomalously Sensitive,” otherwise known as psychic ability.  As you can imagine, this stirs the pot more than a bit as many psychologists have rather strong views on whether this is imaginary or real.  Generally, psychological research tends to dismiss the existence of psychic ability while there seems to be more acceptance among practicing psychologists.

It’s a tricky area.  Imagine you’re a psychologist and a person comes to you and in the course of therapy admits that he/she can see and hear ghosts.  How you respond will depend more on you than the patient.  If you think that ghosts are real, then the patient is sane, but highly sensitive.  If you think that ghosts are imaginary, then you have a delusional schizophrenic or psychotic patient on your hands.  In any case, what you, the therapist, believe, will make a big difference for the patient.  If you are wrong it can have serious consequences.  A person who is sane, but is extremely sensitive may be psychologically harmed by the idea that he/she is crazy.  Likewise a person who is psychotic or paranoid can be harmed by a misdiagnosis.

Hypnotherapist and Schizotypal Personality expert David Ritchey explains the correct approach in his book The H.I.S.S. of the A.S.P.:

(…)  Moreover, as a clinical hypnotherapist, my focus was on the clients’ experiences rather than on the phenomena purported to underlie those experiences.  Therapeutically, it had historically proven efficacious to work with the clients’ experiences as if they were “really real”– to appropriately contextualize them, rather than to dismiss them as symptoms of a mental disorder.  Furthermore, the clients’ belief (or lack thereof) in the objective reality of the alleged underlying phenomena appeared to have little bearing on the successful outcome of the therapy.

This controversy is not at all helpful to people like me because we have obvious biological differences from the general population that create a condition of “otherness” that leads to a sense of isolation.  In the general population, the left side of the brain is dominant, while in schizotypals the right side is dominant.  For that reason, many schizotypal people are left-handed.  Those schizotypals who are right handed, such as myself, may have strong bilateral tendencies.  (We use both hands well.)  Being identified as being different from an early age and understanding the ramifications of this would be very helpful.

Just as extremely tall or short people and left-handers have to adjust to a world that was not built with their needs in mind, right brain people have to deal with a world in which the vast majority of values, attitudes, ideas and beliefs are in line with left brain dominant cultures.  Since those of us with schizotypal personalities typically grow up with little to no understanding of these differences, (and most often no one around us understands these differences either) we are frequently at odds with the rest of the world, which can be very stressful for us.

We tend to be more spiritually oriented than ordinary with an emphasis on direct experience (Gnostic) and tend to value emotional traits over physical ones.  Honesty, integrity, self awareness and wisdom are more valuable to us than height, physical beauty, skin color, sexual orientation or age.  Social issues are more important than personal ones’ and when it comes to objects, usefulness is more important than function.

Aside from these differences, by far the most challenging aspect of being schizotypal is the fast switching between different states of consciousness as a result of our high emotional sensitivity  and consequent strong emotions.  I rarely hear or read of psychologists mentioning this central aspect of our lives.  Logical thought is tied almost exclusively to our emotional state.  When our emotions change, so does our decision making.  This isn’t new.  California law recognizes that fact in this law:

Consumer’s Rights to Cancel Home Solicitation Contracts

September 2010

Virtually any consumer transaction in the amount of $25 or more which takes place in the buyer’s home or away from “appropriate trade premises” can be canceled by the buyer, without penalty or obligation, if the consumer gives a proper notice within three business days without giving a reason after the buyer signs the contract. In order to cancel, the buyer must give the seller written notice of the buyer’s intention not to be bound by the contract.

This cancellation right is created by the Home Solicitation Sales Act (the “Act”).¹ The purpose of the Act is to protect consumers against pressure to make an immediate purchasing decision when a salesperson appears at their home, or where the sales pitch is given at a non-business location. Similar protections apply to most sales by telephonic sellers (see VI. below)²

What this law is saying is that people’s emotions can be swayed by smooth talking salespeople and therefore their logic can be impaired.  If given a chance to return their emotions to their normal state and rethink the contract, they might have regrets and this law gives them an opportunity to seek redress if that happens.

Now if this happens to ordinary people and their ordinary emotional states to the point where it requires a law, imagine what life must be like for people like me who experience their emotions very strongly.  Logical thought can be blown around like a dinghy on the open seas during a storm.  I can tell you from personal experience that this is probably the hardest thing we have to deal with, as these emotions can range from suicidal to deliriously happy.

I have moments of true paranoia, severe panic attacks, sudden phobias, tremendous joy, deep and heartfelt love, mischief and a variety of other very strong emotions.  All of these come with their own logical state of mind and in certain cases, memories.  Some memories are only accessible in certain emotional states.  Many memories and a lot of logical processes are very hard to access while in a state of strong fear.  I’m inclined to believe that different emotional states are actually altered states of consciousness that we’re so familiar with that we don’t even notice that this is what they are.

Yet for all of these strong emotions, I am not a basket case.  I manage just fine.  I did this by creating an Über self.  There is a part of me that watches myself having these emotions and does not get sucked in by them.  It allows me to remain rational in the midst of my logical mind going haywire, in which case the best thing to do is almost always . . . nothing.  Don’t react, don’t make decision, don’t argue or whatever it was that I was going to do and just chill out.  Eventually the heightened emotional state will die down and I’ll be able to think clearly again; often more clearly than I was previously able to.  Sometimes this cool down period is a matter of minutes, sometimes it’s a matter of days. The noise in my head is a constant racket and only this Über self can calm it down.  I have to see me, seeing myself in order to make any change.

Learning how to do this took many years and in the process I never stopped growing as a person and becoming more mature.  I did this because I didn’t have much of a choice.  Either I learned how to deal with this, or I gave up on life.  It was that kind of a decision.

I don’t think that Johnny ever learned how to develop that Über self to watch over his emotional merry-go-round.  Instead, he substituted drugs to quiet the noise in his head.  But what if someone had been there to help him? What if someone had understood his sensitivity and guided him on how to deal with being so different from ordinary people?  How might his life have turned out?

All good questions.

Reductionist thinking works perfectly for this:

Which is made from this:

A car is a very complex thing, but you can break it down to its individual parts and understand them in detail.  We can know how these parts fit together and how they function when they are assembled.  By understanding its parts and how they function together we can know absolutely everything important there is to know about a car.   This is reductionism at its finest.  Most of the sciences see things in this fashion because frankly, it works.  By understanding all the little pieces and seeing how they fit together, you can understand the mechanisms.  And understanding mechanisms gives you power over the process and an ability to adapt it to many uses.

Reductionism has been highly successful in so many areas that one of the most basic problems with this approach has been virtually ignored.  Try to apply reductionism to this:

Can anger be broken down into its pieces?  What pieces?  The movement of the face is not anger; the reaction of the body is not anger; they are processes associated with anger, but they are not the thing itself.  Does understanding how the body functions when a person is angry help you understand anger?  No, not in the slightest.  Anger, -and all emotions for that matter,- can only be understood as a whole.  You cannot put pieces together and get anger from them because the pieces do not convey the essence of anger.  No one doubts that machine bolts, camshafts and pistons can convey the essence of a car.  Their function in creating a car is obvious.  But there is is no way to see the reactions of the body and understand how they can convey anger.  The only way to understand the reactions of the body, is to first understand anger.  There are some emotions that don’t even elicit body reactions.

Can you really apply any reductionism to this emotion?  It’s very clear that sarcasm is being conveyed, but there is absolutely no way to reduce this to a set of physical reactions.  Sarcasm is not the slow clap nor the look in the eyes, nor those two things combined because this emotion can be conveyed with different gestures. If you didn’t know what sarcasm was, it would be very hard to even explain. For that matter, the anger shown above would also be hard to explain. Why is that?

Emotions are acts of consciousness and consciousness is hard to explain because our minds and vocabulary is inherently reductionist and consciousness is irreducible.  That’s the problem in its most basic form.  You cannot approach consciousness with a reductionist mindset or with reductionist tools because none of this works in comprehending what consciousness is.  Nowhere is this more evident than neurobiology.

Discovering how mechanistic processes work – the firing of neurons or the earth revolving around the sun, for example – is considered by some to be an “easy” problem because it involves observation, the description of an event from a third person point of view. “Hard” problems, on the other hand, involve first person experience. They’re the questions that persist even after physical processes have been mapped and explained.

Not only is the brain vastly more complex than previously thought, none of this tells us how we get from dendrites, gamma waves and neurons to sarcasm.  Understanding consciousness requires that we absorb the idea without getting into details.  This kind of thinking runs exactly the opposite of how science works.

I’m sitting here, writing at a computer on a program that exists on the internet and I can and do communicate my ideas all over the whole wide world.  Everything that made this possible was the result of reductionist thinking.  The machines, the networks, the structure of the companies that create them, the economic system that makes this production possible, the network of roads, the planes, the boats that carry the parts around the world are all part of a vast reductionist machinery that has been running western civilization for a couple of millennia at least.  Certainly reductionist thinking has been very, very good to us.

How did we all manage to do something so outrageously stupid as to put ourselves into a position where the fate of the world was decided by one man?

And yet . . . and yet . . . the world had to be saved in 1962 from nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis by a guy born to a peasant family outside of Moscow in 1926.  Vasili Arkhipov, deputy commander of the Soviet submarine B-59, one of three officers aboard the vessel who all had to agree unanimously to launch a nuclear missile, had an attack of sanity and refused to agree with the political officer and the captain to launch a nuclear missile.  (Read the story here.  It’s #6)  You can thank this guy for not sending the human race into extinction.  The Soviets did.  They eventually made him a vice admiral.

While we weren’t there with him at the time, his thinking process is fairly easy to follow:  “Hmm, let’s see . . . launch missile, start war, destroy everything.  This is a BAD idea.  Nyet.”  This is an example of how holistic thinking works.  Arkhipov was in a submarine surrounded by American ships who were using depth charges to either destroy the sub or get it to surface.  (And by the way, what idiot thought that it was a good idea to bomb a sub carrying nuclear missiles?)  He was under some pressure, to put it mildly.  Everyone else, including the Americans, were looking at their particular piece on this nuclear chessboard and reacting only to what was in front of them, oblivious to the obvious consequences.  Arkhipov was the only one who got the big holistic picture:  If a shooting war with nukes got started, nobody would win.  Yes, this is the world’s greatest irony . . . ever.  At the height of the cold war, a commie saved the free world.  The question that this situation raises is this:  How did we all manage to do something so outrageously stupid as to put ourselves into a position where the fate of the world was decided by one man?

This isn’t merely an historical problem.  Reductionist thinking regularly leads to horrific reasoning.   There is more to reductionist thinking than just looking at things in terms of their parts, reductionist thinking is analytical: it suppresses emotion and thereby distorts values, ignores long term consequences and dehumanizes people.  Intermediate goals become more important than strategic ones.  Have you ever wondered why the U.S. is still in Afghanistan when there is absolutely nothing to be gained by it?  Why do American officials say that we’ll be there for many more years?  The answer is J.P. Morgan.  There’s gold in them thar hills.  Does it seem far fetched that the United States would spend billions defending the profits of a banker?  Here is an excerpt from Smedley Butler‘s book: War is a Racket:  (Who was Smedley Butler?  Former commandant of the United States Marine Corp and most decorated marine EVER.  Oh, and he saved the United States from a fascist coup.)

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given [mobster] Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

There may be additional shenanigans that I don’t know about, but this is business as usual. What we have is a situation where a sovereign nation puts its military in harms way in order to protect private business interests.  When viewed with a reductionist mindset, this makes sense.  Strong business = strong America.  We are causing untold suffering at home and abroad through policies set via a corporatist  agenda designed to value profit over human lives.  You can only come up with this insanity if you place no value on emotions, which is exactly what happens with logical, reductionist thinking.  From a holistic standpoint of course, this state of affairs, this is pure evil.    Evil, however, doesn’t even exist in reductionist thinking.  Everything is reduced to choices.  Holistic thinking embraces such concepts as “enough” and “sharing” because individual gain is seen in the context of larger groups which can expand to include the whole world.  Reductionist thinking tends to embrace “lack,” “hoarding” and “winning” because individual gain is not seen in any larger context.

Mostly, a reduction mindset is a trap of sorts because it greatly limits the ability to see “the big picture.”  This becomes a trap because the big picture of someone caught in reductionist thinking appears to be bigger than it really is.  The intermediate picture seems like the big one.  For example, particle physics has been pursuing versions of string theory for thirty years despite serious flaws in this theory and has managed to avoid dealing with obvious signs of consciousness in physics for eighty years.

You can see this mindset at work in capitalist economies even now, where fabulous wealth is in the hands of a tiny few who have so many millions of dollars that they will never personally spend or enjoy 99% of this money in any way.  The idea that this concentration of wealth causes human suffering is completely absent from capitalist economic theory because it isn’t big enough to incorporate that idea.

Holistic thinking is very, very threatening to people who think in terms of reductionism because it undermines their whole set of values.  If you strongly value wealth, power, prestige and fame, as reductionists tend to do, it can be very uncomfortable to have someone broach the idea that these values are not as important as caring, empathy and a general sense of humanity.  If you’ve stayed with me so far, you can see where I’m going with this.  This is the reason that so many scientists have fought any notion of an expanded role for consciousness in science for over a hundred years; it’s not just a radical concept, it completely challenges not only their perceptions of the world, but their perceptions of themselves as well.

People who favor holistic thinking however, do not share this discomfort.  Because of the inclusive nature of holistic thinking, reductionist thinking is seen as only one method of thinking, rather than a way of life, and so is the holistic thinking itself.  The values that accompany holistic thinking, such as love, compassion, cooperation, understanding and empathy, are very basic and solid and therefore are not easily threatened.

The whole struggle to understand the true nature of consciousness must be seen in this light.  It is a struggle not just of ideas, but of values that impact our entire civilization.  It is not an easy thing to change, but it has sweeping implications.

From a materialist viewpoint, where the brain creates the mind, this makes no sense of course, but if we look at consciousness as being a fundamental property of the universe then there is a real possibility that this has a scientific footing.  It is entirely possible to transfer memories from the past into the future as witness with the peculiar phenomenon of Cellular Memory.  (Some recipients of organ transplants acquire habits of their donors.)

I think that the idea has value.  People don’t live in vacuums; we are all part of small communities which are part of larger communities and if we are going to assume that consciousness is fundamental, then we have to acknowledge the fact that consciousness forms entities within entities.  Watch this short video of a white blood cell chasing a microbe to see what I mean:

It’s fairly obvious that both the white blood cell and the bacteria are behaving independently and with conscious intent.  The white blood cell is a living part of our living body.  Or to put it another way, it is a consciousness within a consciousness.  It is both whole unto itself and part of a greater whole at the same time.  This is a demonstration of the holographic nature of consciousness.  All pieces, no matter how small are whole unto themselves and together create something more complex than the sum of the individual pieces.  There is no reason for the grouping of consciousness to stop at a single living entity, such as a human, a bird or even an insect.  The grouping of individual conscious entities into larger entities can easily be found in nature.  (Skip to the 3:19 mark for the really cool stuff.)

There is an eerie similarity between the movement of a flock of starlings and the white blood cell.  Each Starling has its white blood cells which are conscious within the starling which is conscious which is within a flock, which is conscious as well.  We also see these traits within bugs, which, individually are conscious entities and can demonstrate some spectacular examples of systemic constellations in the form of termite mounds and leaf cutter ant colonies.

These are both two dimensional renderings of highly complex, site adapted colonies created by creatures about the size of your fingernail.  These are individual creatures, acting as one to create a structure of immense complexity that no single bug could hope to accomplish.  They have to work together in a way that is only possible if you accept the existence of systemic constellations.

On a much larger scale we have the parapsychological research of the Global Consciousness Project, where it is shown that large changes in human consciousness can affect random number generators.

There are also some interesting experiments and evidence coming from an unlikely source that hint at electromagnetically based entangled communication as the means of information transfer.  The idea of systemic constellations is not at all foreign to current parapsychological experiments.  There is even another theory that runs along the same lines.  Rupert Sheldrake has coined the term Morphogenetic Fields.

Morphic fields in biology
Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organizing fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organization depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.

In other words it appears to be a property of consciousness to form conscious entities which combined form greater conscious entities which combined form greater conscious entities until it extends to the whole universe.

When this concept is applied to psychology it is used to help people see themselves and the problems they have as part of a greater whole.  Somehow, this is quite helpful.  Because of the successes that have come with this approach, this is a small but growing field of study in psychology.  The International Systemic Constellation Association (ISCA) currently has 222 members spanning the globe and according to Wikipedia is being integrated by thousands of practitioners world wide.  (No independent source is given for this claim.)  This is a very small number of people; it is only slightly larger than the field of parapsychology.  That is not surprising however, given the animosity that the field of clinical psychology has towards any theories that involve an expanded view of consciousness.

In the Systemic Constellation system, people are treated as members of larger groups and the impact of those groups on the individual is given significant importance in therapy.  The groups may be as small as a family or as large as an entire nation.  One area of focus with this system for example is the enduring effects of slavery on the psyche’s of men and women generations removed from this horror.

Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker Lisa Iverson writes:

The human tendency to avoid reconnection with feelings regarding this long chapter in U.S. history is an aspect of trauma’s “freeze” response. This frozenness has kept us from recognizing slavery’s contribution to the American and global economy, and today we all pay the price for ignoring enslaved African Americans’ contributions. These unhealed, unacknowledged collective wounds of slavery’s landscape cuts us off from creating sustainable, just solutions for today’s economy. We deeply need one another to melt these frozen traumas.

According to practitioner Dan Booth Cohen PhD:

Systemic constellations reveal and transform embedded patterns that are otherwise very challenging to understand and change. Intellectually, we may recognize patterns of negative behaviors and destructive relationships, but in practice it can be extremely difficult to free ourselves from the ones that feel most unwanted. Through this process we become aware of the complex web of interconnection reaching into our present from generations past. Experiencing this interconnectedness so directly has an amazingly freeing effect.

To put this in more pedestrian terms:  Hey!  It works!  Do it again!  The people who practice this technique do it for that one simple reason.  I am all in favor of practicality in psychology.  Personally, in my admittedly quick review of the literature, I find that the practitioners are very much moved by what they experience in healing their clients.  There are several instances in the literature that I read where the language these practitioners use is almost poetic.  What that says to me is that they have hit a well of emotional depth that they are bravely exploring; it seems to be very difficult for them to explain this in the dry, clinical terms that one so commonly finds in psychology research.  Is this not more real than a list of pathologies and their symptoms?  I think so.

This method is the antithesis of modern psychology.  While most studies focus on breaking humans into their individual parts and classifying them, this method treats us not only as a whole, but as part of a greater whole.  I would term this Holistic Psychology, which, like its Holistic medicine counterpart, seems to work better than classical models.  Hmmm.

Psychic people are perceived as being more vulnerable to psychic attack and control than other characters in the story who are not psychic.  In Star Trek, The Next Generation, Deanna Troy:

In addition to the alien impregnation, she has suffered two incidents of telepathic mental violations.^[7] She was used as a dumping ground for dark thoughts by a diplomat travelling on the Enterprise, causing her to age extremely rapidly^[8]. She has also been possessed by alien energy beings on multiple occasions^[9]. Together, these incidents constitute essentially being raped at least half a dozen different times.

You. Can't. Control. Me! You need to make an appointment.

This reflects a deeper social belief in many societies that people who are more open and more vulnerable emotionally are somehow weaker than other people.  This perception is somewhat less true for women than for men, but it holds true nonetheless.  In reality, this perception is a complete falsehood.  It is the exact opposite of what actually happens.  In western societies, people tend to perceive intellectual prowess and a minimal display of emotions as being strong and you can see this in just about any action movie whether the hero is male or female.

But psychic ability is strongly tied to emotions and affects us on deep subconscious levels; intellect does not come into play and would be useless in a psychic attack.  To fend off such an attack, you need to be able to first recognize that you are being attacked.  While this might seem to be obvious, it isn’t.  People who have minimal to no psychic ability are very much inclined to view all the thoughts in their heads as their own and all their pain to be originating from themselves.  Psychic people on the other hand, learn very quickly to differentiate their emotions from the swirl around them and they learn to defend themselves from the kind of low grade attacks that happen all the time.  Otherwise they can have no peace of mind.  A psychic attack is really nothing more than someone else trying to get you to be fearful, which distorts your thinking.

A sophisticated psychic attack would do the obvious thing: use your own fears and suppressed emotions against you.  The more awareness you have of your own fears and the fewer suppressed emotions you have, the less vulnerable you will be to psychic attack and control.  Captain Picard’s personality would be easier to suppress because he is already in a condition of suppression.  Deanna in contrast, having had her psychic abilities professionally trained on a planet full of psychic people and by extension, fully aware of her inner emotional landscape, would have had years of training in dealing with psychic intrusions and would be well prepared for the fight.  She would be the last, not the first, to succumb to such a thing.

Somewhat more ridiculous is the X-Files movie “I Want to Believe”, which features a pedophile psychic priest, Joseph “Father Joe” Crissman.  Leaving aside the ridiculous notion that Fox Mulder is called in because he has “experience with psychics” the whole notion of notion of a pedophile psychic is absurd.

"I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything."

What part of empathy don’t you understand?  Psychic ability is strongly tied to empathy and this in turn produces tremendous compassion.  It is pretty hard to imagine a psychic person committing such a terrible act of harm to a child.  To be a pedophile, you have to suppress your natural empathy and if you didn’t, you would be experiencing the emotional trauma of the child as it was happening and this would, in turn, elicit tremendous compassion and a desire to stop the pain.  It would be a bit of a mood killer to say the least.

At least these psychics were portrayed with a more realistic set of abilities, but frequently psychics are portrayed as having super powers, -but without the emotional personality that comes with the talent.-  To wit:

"Who says psychics can't be tough guys?"

The problem with Professor X from the X-Men, is that as psychic ability grows stronger, so do the personality traits associated with it.  Pretty much without exception, the highly psychic people I’ve run into over the years were also very emotional and struggled to deal with those emotions in a world where people don’t understand.  You simply cannot be open to everyone around you and not feel what they’re feeling.  Given that Professor X is one of the most powerful of the mutants, he would be a borderline basket case.  In the comics and movies of course, he has perfect control and isn’t at all affected by the emotions of other people except when he wants to be.  In reality, life is just not that simple.

Professor X, who strives for peace between humans and mutants is ironically hurting the case for real psychic people.  Wherever psychic people are portrayed as having superpowers it raises unrealistic expectations in young impressionable minds about what psychic ability is and what it is capable of.  It isn’t just the mind control and perfect telepathy, it’s also the idea that somehow psychic ability is divorced from emotions, which is certainly not the case.

You can see in the picture that Professor X has a stern, foreboding look that is typical of people suppressing their emotions; yet he can’t possibly be doing this and be such an extraordinarily powerful psychic.

What to make of all this?  I think that the world has a long ways to go in understanding psychic ability and psychic people.  So many of the portrayals are wildly inaccurate and this does affect people’s perceptions of us.  While I think that psychics are portrayed incorrectly in sci-fi for the most part, it was encouraging for me to see a film recently that got it right, even though it wasn’t sci-fi.  The Hereafter, with Matt Damon, directed by Clint Eastwood.  The combination of writing and acting absolutely nailed the role.  I was shocked more than anything else.

]]> http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/psychics-in-sci-fi-a-quick-look-at-three-examples/feed/ 4 craigweiler Just a typical Sci Fi psychic doing her job. Joseph "Father Joe" Crissman played by Billy Connelly from the movie: "X-Files: I Want to Believe" Professor Charles Xavier. Art by Aaron Lopresti http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/a-little-trick-of-precognition-by-neil-miller/ http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/a-little-trick-of-precognition-by-neil-miller/#comments Sun, 04 Dec 2011 00:04:38 +0000 neilmiller2011 http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/?p=1196 ]]> Suppose you could see your future, or, at least little moments of it.  And, as these moments revealed themselves to you, like the rising sun of a new day, you found yourself scratching your head saying “hunh?”, “now, what’s this?”  But, if you saw these moments and you knew that they were meant to be then that means that they were fated, right?  There’s no alternative explanation, right?  I’m not so sure.

These questions are based on some of my recent psychic experiences.   Were these moments fated?     Because I’m precognitive, the idea of fate is not an abstract concept to me, it is something that is very tangible.  I don’t reject the concept of fate out of hand, but,I do think that there are alternative explanations.  I can weigh the evidence of my own experience and make a choice.  A choice between fate and……

What if I’m using my precognitive ability as a tool, an aid to my pushing myself into situations where I have to stretch out my emotions, even confront something about me that will force me to grow?  I don’t really want to think too hard about it.  Far too many related thoughts are suddenly coming to mind and my imagination wants to scatter its energy over each of these.  Rather than do that, I’l just move through these thoughts step by step.

I’ve stumbled upon a little trick of precognition.  With pen and notebook nearby, I’ll sit back in an easy chair and put my feet up.  For the month ahead, and, each day of that month, I’ll slowly say “there’s something coming up” on the 1^st, 2^nd , 3^rd, and all the rest of the days of that month. What “coming up” means is that there would be an unusual event during the day.  This event would have some out of the ordinary emotional impact for me.  If I felt something about a day, I’d record that day in my log.  This procedure got so easy to do I moved farther out in time than the preceding month.  For example, I may pick my impact days for October in mid-August.  Several times I’ve picked impact days over 70 days in advance.  Do you understand?  Over 70 days in advance I’ve picked the exact day that an event with emotional impact happens to me.

Psychically, reaching forward with your mind to see tomorrow is doable.  But, a week, a month, over 2 months; the farther out in time I go the result is less light, more shadows.  I know when I’ve picked a day I feel a kind of door opening.  The emotions I feel on the other side of that door are what I call the impact.  (If the day was going to have a serious event-car crash, win the lottery-I’m trusting I would have felt something Way! out of the ordinary.  So far there have been no riches or hospital bills.)  I don’t make any attempt to change my activities on that day (I’m lying) and I try not to anticipate or 2^nd guess details of the expected impact (lying again).  It’s just about impossible for me to psychically pin down details (the whole truth) about the event I felt weeks earlier.  The future was cloudy on the day of my monthly psychic session, and, on the impact day, I’m too jumpy.  I just try to calmly wait for a door to open-like these doors;

I was shopping at a natural foods market.  Two employees were nearby.  There was a girl who looked about 17.  She had a pierced lip, a pierced nose and I wondered if Ozzie Osbourne had a mysterious run away daughter.  The other employee was a guy about my (62) age.  I was talking to the guy about discovering/rediscovering the joy of Miles Davis music videos, on the Internet.  The girl looked up from stocking the shelf and said, “Oh, I love Miles Davis   I picked this day 71 days early.  My little runaway took a giant step past my image of her.  I loved her doing that; I always love it when people go beyond the surface appearance I see.  This was what I was psychically aware of 10 weeks before.  Plus, I have a surprising new friend (?) to talk to.  With this event my emotions got stretched out a bit.  The other event overlaps this concept.

“At least you don’t have to work with her,” said a co-worker.  Recently, at work, my department added 3 new people.  A friend of mine transferred in from another department, and, the others were new hires.  Speaking on behalf of all 3 ladies, my friend told me they were disgusted by an employee that I personally can’t stand either.I got that particular premonition 57 days early.  Work environments can be toxic for a variety of reason, but life goes on.  I know it’s practical to do my job and try and get along, but getting along with everyone means you’re looking at everyone with a smiley face, thus through a kind of emotional haze.  And, one’s breathing can be a bit labored because of all of the emotions that are suppressed.    My friend became even more my friend for not settling for that sort of interpersonal smog.  I was relieved to find out that the person that I found so disagreeable was disliked by my friend as well.  (We had both made attempts to get along with her, but without success.)

I haven’t said anything about fate yet.  Let’s try and take a closer look.  Fate doesn’t have to look like a Hollywood movie or resemble great literature.  You have a cholesterol problem and you just bought yourself a pizza with everything on it.  Is it fate if you get a heart attack? .  A data entry clerk’s young boyfriend just came up behind her and gave her a sweet little kiss.  She was distracted and didn’t check her work.  You have a zero balance at Visa but somehow owe them $10,000.  Is that fate because someone else caused the problem?  What if the Visa problem was the result of your karma from a past life?  Does that make it fate?  Where does personal responsibility fit in?

Note: I’ve got dozens of impact days logged that I could mull over.  For the impact moments I’ve experienced, my precognition had to have been working real hard.  For most of those moments I had to be at a certain place, at a certain time, on a certain day.  That’s too much for my precognition to handle, right?  Therefore, these moments had to be fated.  Here is my honest reply;

I knew the day and I could have chosen to stay home, go out of town for a while, anything that would take me out of my normal routine.  I chose to be part of the day.  My precognition lit up on that calendar day and helped me with my timing.  The message my psychic ability was giving me was “Don’t miss this day Neil, don’t miss this moment.”  My precognitive ability has pushed me into situations that helped me to learn and grow.   I can endorse my precognition as a spiritual guide for myself.  And, I hope to use my precognitive ability to deepen my understanding of this whole idea of fate.  I’ll look at each impact day with my precognition and then ask myself what if fate was my only choice to understand the impact day, in other words, no choice at all.  It’s pretty clear where that leads.

I’m very fortunate that I stumbled onto this little trick of precognition.

This is a question I’ve been mulling around recently as it is sometimes hard to put something that you kind of have a sense about into words.  I’ve been around psychic people most of my life and I’ve also studied some anthropology and linguistics in college.  One of the things that I learned was that every system of speech and every method of living and the rational thought process that groups of people have established comes with has an internal logic and a set of rules that work extremely well within the system.  Psychic people are no exception to this.

It starts with the realization that psychic people make their important decisions based on their feelings rather than using logic, information and rational thought.  This might seem batshit crazy to skeptics and left brained people in general, but it isn’t.

This process is actually codified into language with such terms as “go with your gut” and “it feels right.”  These are familiar terms to just about anybody, but they ring particularly true for psychic people.  The reason for this is quite simple:  it works better than any other process a psychic person has available to them.  This kind of thinking is the product of a sort of subconscious training process involving having a feeling about something important, making a decision based on it and then evaluating the outcome.  Far more often than not, the psychic person will be presented with evidence that a feeling based approach yielded better results.  Over time it becomes obvious that this method of evaluating the best course of action is superior to thinking things out.

Of course, most psychic people will do the sensible thing and blend the two methods, using whichever is the most appropriate at the moment, but it’s useful to note just how useful a feeling based approach can be.  Psychic people in general can usually give several examples off the top of their heads.

In the area of romance, a feeling based approach to the selection of a mate is often the only one available.  It is simply impossible to consider all the variables and most people know this, with even the most logical of people having to succumb to the superiority of their feelings over their rational thought in this matter.

My personal example is perhaps a good one.  When I met my wife Carmel, she was a bit overweight, an angry person, often disagreeable, easily upset and to being very bossy.  By any sane logic I should have moved on to find someone with fewer problems.  But my feelings told me the exact opposite and this is what guided me.  I never really stopped to think about it, I just went forward and rushed into marriage.  It turned out to be a really good thing.

What I could not have figured out at the time was Carmel’s capacity for change, which turned out to be quite the significant factor.  She had food allergies, which she immediately got under control with my help and her weight dropped to more normal levels.  She also calmed down because she was being supported in a positive way for the first time and during the inevitable clashes that we had during our first years of marriage, she turned out to have good character and the ability to admit she was wrong and change her behavior when necessary.  Another important factor was that I had found a woman that was quite as devoted to me as I was to her; I hadn’t considered that at all.

In short, there was no logical way to assess the situation, but using a feeling based approach yielded not just satisfactory, but superb results.

I can’ emphasize this enough.  What seems from the outside to be a rather strange way to run one’s life, is in actually a group of people merely playing to their own strengths.  A feeling based approach to rational thought can be quite successful if one is a feeling based person to start with.

Using a feeling based approach requires a certain outlook on life that is definitely foreign to skeptics.  Psychic people tend towards believing things until proven wrong, rather than disbelieving things until proven right.  This method avoids the negative mindset that might interfere with the successful feeling based approach to rational thinking.  Instead of closing off opportunity to avoid being wrong, the psychic person opens up opportunity on the chance some of it might be true.  While to the left brain person this might make a person gullible and susceptible to charlatans and looney beliefs, they are only partly right.  This system of thinking has its own set of logic.

Normally, our opinions carry no weight except in our heads and the only penalty for being wrong is merely a bit of humiliation of the ego.  If a person can withstand that, and a psychic person usually can, then the penalty for being wrong is quite minimal.  It is also much easier to discover the truth about something when you embrace it fully, so a psychic person will gain more first hand knowledge of more things faster than a logical, left brained skeptical person as a general rule.  The spirit of questioning conventional beliefs and exploring unusual things is a powerful learning tool that psychic people tend to take advantage of.

A feeling based approach generally requires a more trusting outlook on life.  One of the advantages of this approach is that psychic people are more likely to learn from the advice of others and also from their mistakes and use that information to their advantage.  A more skeptical approach to life generally involves having to make one’s own mistakes, which can be quite costly in terms of time and effort over the course of years.

That psychic people should develop a pattern of thinking that plays to their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses should be a surprise to no one.  What I do find incredible is that I have never run across this type of assessment before.  It’s not as if I’m privy to some sort of exclusive information, I’m just putting together the obvious pieces.  If there is any fault here to be had, it is in those who choose to ignore the basic fact that people are different in ways that are sometimes difficult to understand.

This is a rant.  Can you tell?  Let me explain.  My internet is down.  We had a great connection which we established years ago when we were going to put in a T1 line.  (That’s a high speed connection.)  We eventually settled on a 6MB connection and all was well.

However, when more people started to get internet connections in our neighborhood, rather than run new lines, AT&T saved themselves some time and money by simply robbing from our line.  They did this a little bit at a time, gradually eroding our service until they finally crashed our internet service.  Now we have had to downgrade to 3MB service because the connection has been degraded so much.  And we have to pay the same amount.  All because AT&T knew that they could get away with it.  And they were right.

This is an attitude normally reserved for medieval royalty.  They stole from us, robbed us, and there will be no consequences.  It’s not even worth complaining about.  They are so powerful that this is inconsequential for them.  And who is them?

It is an unaccountable faceless bureaucracy.   No one is there that can be accused of theft.  The courts don’t recognize corporate crime in that way.  There will be no redress for this crime because it is too much trouble for what we could gain, assuming that we could get past the faceless customer service to even complain to someone who could potentially do something about it.

We may be without internet for up to a month because of this.  I am furious at being jerked around by this and enraged at my helplessness in the face of it.  We have been robbed and something of value has been taken from us just as surely as if someone had broken into our home.  My business and my wife’s depend on this.  We need to be able to research, get our email and other tasks that require a connection.  We can’t do the simple things like pull up a website and print it out.  I have to drag a laptop with me and get a connection somewhere else.

This is way off topic from psychic stuff, I know, but I had been working on a more appropriate post and this just derailed it.  I have a hard time concentrating when I’m this angry.

The large corporations may not have subjects and may not own large pieces of land, but they have their own kingdoms all the same and they behave in much the same way as the royalty of ages past.

Anatole France, 1844 – 1924

As Fall sets in, the authorities in cities across America are hoping against hope that the cold weather will drive the protestors away.  To that end, in New York, they are seizing gas cans and generators as a “safety measure.”  The message is clear:  GO AWAY!

It’s not going to happen.  The authorities, being the of the Top -> Down mentality, are having to learn the one thing every parent of teenagers must also learn:  the more aggressive you are, the more of a fight you’re going to be in for.  Aggressive police action has helped galvanize support for this movement.  The Occupy Wall Street protests have spread across the United States and the world.  It seems like it has been going on forever, but the protests only started on September 17th of this year. Since that time it has grown by staggering proportions, with protests occurring in almost 400 cities spanning  54 countries.  I think that it’s safe to say that this protest is not going to go away anytime soon and will undoubtedly endure through winter.  The Occupy Wall Street movement has legs.

Why have these protests gotten so large so fast?  It’s not the media; they have only covered the protests begrudgingly.  I think it is the fact that the OWS protestors, unlike the Tea Party, are angry at the right people.  The Occupy Wall Street protests have the power of truth and everyone knows it.  They are speaking directly to a very real problem that is well documented and shared by the majority of Americans and by large numbers of people in other countries.  Indeed, disparity in wealth is a world wide problem;  if you are going to protest something, wealth disparity and the crony corporate welfare that goes with it should be on your short list; most other social problems stem from this problem.

The Occupy Wall Street protests are a good thing.  We need to keep four things in perspective here:  1.  People are going to protest.  2.  Peaceful protests are better than violent ones.  3.  Violent protests are better than violent insurrection.  4.  Violent insurrection is better than outright civil war.  These protests are the safety valve of a true democracy and they must be taken seriously and allowed to exist because the alternatives are much, much worse.

The popularity of the movement can be seen in the donations streaming in.  To date, the organization has received over $500,000 dollars to continue with the protests, which brings me around to the main point of this article: for every protestor on the streets there are thousands upon thousands of people who agree with what they are doing and support their actions, if only silently.  It is the Power of Many.  The Many may take no action themselves, but they participate in polls, they vote and above all, they see.  They see the mainstream reaction to the protests; they see the police reactions to the protests; they see the desperate attempts of the minions of the elite to make this thing GO AWAY.

The protests may not directly achieve the goal of closing the wealth gap, but the longer they endure, the more they force this extremely important issue to the front of the line, making it virtually impossible for the mainstream media to ignore it.  Big protests are news and require news coverage whether one agrees with them or not.  While at first, the news agencies could mock the protests and dismiss them, this is becoming harder as they drag on.  As I said: everyone knows how serious this is and what is at stake.  It is not about informing people and spreading the word, it is a battle of wills.  Once undertaken, the Many always win.  The group consciousness simply forces its will on a willful minority and things change.

Perhaps the overriding message of the Occupy Wall Street protests is a demonstration of where power actually lies:  In. The. Many.  The media has been forced to cover these protests against their will, which should dispel any myth that they can actually control the debate through the power of mass media.  Just because people watch the news does not mean that they trust it to be true.  This is true of every major news outlet.  They can get people to watch, but they cannot make them believe.  Jon Stewart, the comedian, is arguably the most trusted news source on television; why?  More than anyone else, he tells the unvarnished truth.  There are so many other people to choose from, yet Comedy Central has our generation’s version of Walter Cronkite.  The Many have recognized the influence of corporate interests in their news and the resulting biases and no longer trust them to do their job impartially.  In the eyes of the public, they have been reduced to being entertainment.

Now they are facing the music.  Without credibility, they have no power to sway the majority of public opinion on the OWS protests.  Mainstream media has tried to lead opinion and control the debate, but the OWS protests have demonstrated the true nature of the power structure: The Many are perfectly capable of leading opinion and controlling the debate and when they choose to do so, the mainstream media has no choice but to follow.  It is the difference between a trusted news source with the humility to understand this power structure, such as Jon Stewart, and the talking heads that fill most of the airtime on mainstream media.

A large collective consciousness has decided that it is time for change and it has manifested in the form of protests all around the world.  The full effect of this force has yet to be seen, but you can be sure of one thing.  Change will come; probably slowly, but with inevitability because the Many are the true source of power.

The other hard part about describing what it is like to be psychic is that like almost all other psychic people, I was born this way.  I have trouble imagining what it would be like to not be psychic.  When I have tried to do this, it comes across as condescending towards other people, which is not my intent.  On the other hand, I have a duty to tell the truth, which is this:  not being psychic feels like a cold barren place to me.  I do not understand how people can live this way without going insane from the torture of being cut off from the feeling of connectedness.  It feels horrible to me when I imagine it.

But that is beside the point.  I promised to try and explain what it is like to be psychic and so, here goes:

The actual psychic ability that most people are familiar with is something that I have to try to access.  I do not normally experience telepathy and precognition unless I am actively trying.  The strangeness of this is the Yoda-like way in which I have to approach this.  Look without looking, try without trying, etc.  That sort of thing.  I can be surprised and I have occasionally had car accidents or injured myself working.  These things have always happened while I was feeling tense and unhappy and my mind was a million miles away from what I was doing.  When I am fully present and aware, I am completely safe from any harm.  I know that I do not need to fear dying in an accident or because of an illness of any sort; it’s not going to happen to me.  In fact, nothing terrible is ever going to happen to me; I know instinctively that this is not in my future.  My job in this life is to transition from a person of insecurity and fear to becoming powerful and happy.  It is very hard work, but if you had seen me as a kid you would agree that I have come a very long way towards meeting that goal.

The main reason that nothing terrible will ever happen to me is that I can sense bad paths in my life in the areas of health and relationship and steer clear of them long before they cause me damage.  For example, I have always taken great care not to injure my back or knees irreparably.  Even in my 20′s I was careful and it is paying off now, later in life.

There are two main ways I receive psychic information:  visually and experientally.  The visual part always comes with emotion.  If for example, I want to know who is going to win a football game, I just go to the end of the game and look at how the players are feeling.  Who feels depressed at the end of the game?  Beyond that, I struggle with getting clear pictures; I’ve never been particularly good at it.  I never really learned to draw either, so that might have something to do with it.  In low light, I can see the energy field around people and all other living things if I try.  If I look for it, I can see in a generalized way where people are hurting.

The experience part of it is that I can experience the consciousness of other living things.  It is a little harder to describe what is going on here.  I can see things through other people’s perception, provided that they are not too screwed up, although this is always my perception seeing theirs, so there is some translation going on.  I can easily feel what other people are feeling provided they are not too far away on the spectrum of either enlightened or unenlightened.  I should explain this:

I tend to rate people on a consciousness scale.  Enlightened people are bright to me, and unenlightened people lack that brightness.  This doesn’t have to do with people’s emotions at the moment, but rather how much wisdom, compassion and love they have been able to create for themselves over the years.  Age usually makes a difference, but not always.  This ability to connect with the consciousness of living things is not limited to our planet.  I can connect with the consciousness of beings from uh, someplace else.  I don’t know where they are, only that I can feel them and unlike people, they are quite consciously aware of it when I connect with them.

And of course, there is the connectedness.  There is a sense of belonging to something vast, something much greater than myself that completely transcends my individual life.  All I can say is that it is truly beautiful.

I welcome the experiences of other psychic people:  What is it like being psychic?

For anyone who takes a pro psi position on the web in an open Internet forum, it can be really difficult to see skeptics as possessing any humanity at all.  The close mindedness we encounter, the ignorance, the spiteful ridicule and the idiotically stubborn refusal to ever be wrong all give the impression that skeptics are the sorriest bunch of losers ever to live in their mother’s basement.  But this description does not fit skeptics; they tend to be well educated, well rounded individuals. They are mostly male[2] and in many situations they share the same values as we do.  I have seen no indication that skeptics are normally racists or bigots either.

Psi skeptics tend to believe in evolution and climate change and favor liberal economic policies, much like many psychics and believers do.  It is rare for me to meet skeptics in real life, but when I do, these people are almost always polite, pleasant and courteous, much in contrast to the lunacy that I see on line.

So what causes these people to check their brains at the door whenever they discuss the topic of psychic ability?  There seem to be some personality characteristics that fit skeptics and explain why understanding psychic ability is so difficult for them.

Trust

One thing that I have heard several times from skeptics is that they are very hesitant to trust their instincts.  It is perhaps the single most important difference between skeptics and psychics.  Psychics and believers in contrast, normally trust their instincts.

From this one significant difference, all of the other pieces fall into place.  One of the most consistent traits that I have noticed from a wide variety of skeptics is that they don’t trust me.  Why should they?  Because I know more about this subject than they do.  The skeptics that I encounter rarely ask questions or wish to know anything about me at all despite the fact that I tell them that I am psychic.  (I can’t remember any skeptic asking me even the most basic question: How do I know that I am psychic?) They are, however, eager to tell me what they think that they know and then defend their position.

Militant skeptics think that I am a fraud and moderate skeptics think that I merely have a mistaken belief based on the assumption that I am not very good at calculating probabilities or chance.

This lack of trust extends to ridiculous extremes.  After all, about ¾ of the world population believes in psi.[3]  According to Wikipedia:

“Another survey conducted in 2006 by researchers from Australia‘s Monash University[37] sought to determine what types of phenomena that people claim to have experienced and the effects these experiences have had on their lives. The study was conducted as an online survey with over 2,000 respondents from around the world participating. The results revealed that around 70% of the respondents believe to have had an unexplained paranormal event that changed their life, mostly in a positive way. About 70% also claimed to have seen, heard, or been touched by an animal or person that they knew was not there; 80% have reported having a premonition, and almost 50% stated they recalled a previous life.”[4]

Skeptics are sitting on a rock in an ocean of believers and they do not trust any of them to be telling the truth about their experiences.  5 billion people must be deluded or liars according to them.  The only way that a person can maintain such an enormous conceit is if they do not trust themselves.  They see their own inability to trust their instincts and they have concluded that instincts are not to be trusted.

A corollary to this is that skeptics have more trouble relating to their own feelings.  This leaves them blind to situations where their emotions are controlling their logic and they are far more vulnerable to cognitive dissonance and less able to cope with it than those who are more aware of their own feelings.

If a person does not trust their instincts, then they must find something else to trust and it is understandable that they will not be particularly flexible about it.  Unsurprisingly, skeptics favor the status quo.  Science is the rock that they typically sit on, clinging to whatever the mainstream scientific establishment favors at the moment and even twisting it if it does not meet their internal image of what it is supposed to be.

For a person that does not trust the world inside of themselves, the world on the outside is all there is, which is how we get illogical and fanatical defenses of a materialistic view of the world even though science is pretty clear on the point that reality does not fit that description.

 Detail Oriented with Compartmentalization

Trust is a right brain feature.  You have to grasp the essence of things in order to trust and you cannot get bogged down in details.  However, this is exactly what happens to skeptics.  Even in discussions with moderate skeptics, I have seen time and again that they do very well when involved in details.  When asked to consider things as a whole, however, they fail miserably.

Of the rare moderate skeptics who actually know something about the science of parapsychology this is a consistent feature of their evaluations.  They can pick at just about any single study and come to the conclusion that something is wrong with it, but entirely miss the fact that they always do the same thing.  For instance:  a skeptic will find nothing wrong with this incomplete chart of parapsychological lab research and the skeptical conclusions:

Overview of Scientific Parapsychology Skepticism

*Studies replicated by other scientists

†Meta analyses have been done.

†† Cleve Backster, (retired) who performed the original experiments was not a research scientist, he was, however, one of the premiere polygraph experts in the world.

A skeptic will not be able to perceive this as a repetitive pattern of dogmatic denial, but will instead, want to focus on the specifics of each individual case to point out the perceived flaws.  It is almost impossible for a skeptic to grasp that the individual studies can have flaws AND there can also be a pattern of dogmatic skepticism.         The skepticism as a whole has a flaw that cannot be seen in individual cases.

Nor do they have a problem in holding their skeptical views while dismissing the experiences of half the world’s population, the hundreds of case studies on various forms of psychic ability or disregarding consciousness in physics.  The reason is that strongly detail oriented people compartmentalize these things and lack the necessary skills to comprehend them as a whole.

I think that this is often confused with stubbornness on the part of skeptics, when in reality it is a gaping hole in their ability to process information.

Lack of Imagination

Here again, we see a deficiency in a crucial right brain activity.  In the area of imagination, skeptics fly blind.  To a degree, they lack the ability to visualize concepts that are foreign to them and the ability to see issues from all sides.  Imagination is a crucial skill in accepting new ideas, but it requires internal trust because not all of those new ideas will be widely accepted.  Imagination also suffers in the presence of compartmentalization because it requires letting go of such strong focus.

In conclusion, what we have here is a person who has a limited ability to trust with a left-brain outlook and a very narrow ability to focus and a lack of trust in their own instincts.  This necessarily limits their imagination and puts skeptics in the position of trusting exterior sources instead of themselves.  This then makes it extremely difficult for skeptics to take in new information which conflicts with their previously held beliefs.  (Because they put their trust in these exterior sources.)  It also makes them vulnerable to cognitive dissonance .