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thejournallo · 2 months

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Explain the basic: Divination tool

Desclaimer: Everything I will talk about is information that I got from books and sites online and even videos on YouTube. In my years of practice, I learned as much as I could out of curiosity and what works best for me. I suggest you do the same by learning as much as you can on your own (I will be here making posts teaching this kind of stuff) from multiple sources.

As always, I will love to hear your thoughts! and if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to answer them! If you liked it, leave a comment or reblog (that is always appreciated!). If you are interested in more methods, check the masterlist!

As a divination witch, I obviously work a lot with the divine, and what I'm about to say are just a few of the things you may use or perform in this type of witchcraft work.

A word of caution, though: I've worked with divine magic for a long time; don't get into it unless you know what you're doing, and especially not without defending yourself. In this list, I will clearly explain what each item does and how it works, and some of this is for a more "advanced" sort of witchcraft.

In witchcraft, there are numerous divination tools practitioners use to gain insight into the past, present, or future or to communicate with spiritual entities. I personally believe that it is the tool that chooses you, not you choosing the tool. Here are some common ones:

Tarot Cards:

A deck of 78 cards with various symbols and images that are interpreted in readings to gain insight into a question or situation. These 78 cards are divided into major arcana and minor arcana. The major arcana may change with the deck that you choose, but the main symbolism is the same, and sometimes you will find decks that have more than just 78 cards.

Runes:

A rune is a letter in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets native to the Germanic peoples. The runes are an ancient method of divination used even before medieval times. Runes can be made of stone, wood, or other materials, and each symbol has its own meaning. You can easily make your own runes.

Crystal Ball Scrying/Scrying Mirror:

This requires gazing into a crystal ball or other reflective surface, such as a mirror, to obtain visions or insights. You do it by just looking at the shiny surface in low light, with nothing to distract you. Your vision will "blur," allowing you to experience visions or gain insights. There is a good reason why this happens. It's essentially our brain getting tired of our reflection and starting to make up new stories, but it's not all psychology since, as we all know, mirrors are gateways. So it is advised not to try this method unless you are an experienced witch or just lack protection, as you may invite something you do not want to invite.

Pendulum Divination:

A pendulum, often a crystal or metal weight on a chain, is used to answer yes-or-no questions or to indicate directions or choices. The pendalum moves on its own, and before you start actually using it, I suggest you ask the pendalum which direction is yes and which is no. Much like the Ouija board, this object can be used to talk to spirits and ghosts, so be careful to always say thanks and say goodbye once you finish a session, even if it is not the primary use. Better safe than sorry.

Tea Leaf Reading:

Interpretation of patterns formed by tea leaves at the bottom of a cup after drinking. Practitioners see symbols and images in the leaves and use them for divination. that's it. that's the tea.

Astrology:

Reading and interpreting the positions and movements of celestial bodies to gain insight into personality traits, events, and relationships. that can be the oroscope, your birth chart etc.

Ouija Board:

A flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, numbers, and other symbols. Participants use a planchette to spell out messages supposedly from spirits or other supernatural entities. This is one of those tools that you don't have to play around with. It is not a game you can literally get into if you are not careful enough. The way that the Ouija board works is that you place your finger on the planchette; if you don't have a planchette, a metal ring will do just fine. Once you position it, you say, "Hello, im --- and i here to talk to only benevolent spirits, and only benevolent spirits can come true and talk to me." Once this part is done, it is NOT THE PLANCHETTE THAT MOVES YOU MOVE THE PLANCHETTE Hollywood lies to you; what a surprise! Once you are done chit-chatting with the spirits, make sure the spirits say goodbye. Say your goodbye, and once you are done, close the space and banish everything "bad" that may have come true. Again, better safe than sorry.

Numerology:

The study of the mystical significance of numbers and their influence on human life and events. a good example will be angel numbers like 444 or 555

Dream Interpretation:

Analyzing the content and symbolism of dreams to gain insight into subconscious thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Dreams can tell a lot of our personal lives, and 100% of dreams know what's up before we ourselves know. Trust and follow your dreams.

These tools are often used in combination with intuition, ritual, and personal symbolism, and the effectiveness of each tool can vary depending on the practitioner's skill and connection with their craft.

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halfelven · 2 years

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Hey love! Venus, Descendant, Aries, and 1H for the Astrology asks? I hope you have a great day! 💜💜

thanks, love! 💚 from Astrology ask game ☄️ I'm a bit sick, but I am having a wonderful time now realising that I don't have class again after today until the 15th 💚💚💚💚💚💚

venus ⇢ describe your ideal type

A very gentle, careful person with a great love of humanity and the world. A person of honour in perhaps this sense of the word: ‘the quality of knowing and doing what is morally right’, like the sense of how you react to the world, who you are when no one sees, not how people view you. Someone with a strong sense of what is right to do, who is brave, kind, and loyal. Who knows who they are and what they want. Someone who is able to understand their own feelings, is connected to their soul, and who goes out of their way to help other people. Someone who carefully considers their own values and does not just follow the morals given by tradition or their society, but who spends a lot of time thinking about what is helpful, what is actually a principle that should be followed. Someone who understands that they can’t always live up to what they expect of themselves, but who picks themselves up where they’ve fallen, apologises, and makes good on that apology.

Someone I can admire because they are working towards something greater than just themselves. Who I could trust when I have lost some of my strength, and who knows they can trust me when they have lost some of theirs. This probably sounds pretentious, but I tend to sound pretentious. What I mean is, I grew up in a very difficult environment with a very cruel and evil person and spent years finding a way to not be the bitter, angry, selfish, untrusting person that that life was teaching me to be. And I want to be with a person who also knows who they are, and whom I can trust and admire.

On a less pretentious level, I like strong people (who know how to survive in the wild), with long hair, and who are musically inclined.

(I know what people might say, and in my defence, Tolkien took an awful lot of inspiration from my cultures.)

descendant ⇢ what kind of people do you usually attract?

Number one is I usually attract people who specifically want someone who is gentle, kind, and emotionally supportive. Which is… I am, but it tends to be suffocating when they are looking more for someone who will give and give to them and not expect much in return. I have always been very independent and people pick up on that and interpret it as not needing someone. It gets quickly frustrating.

The other type of people I tend to attract are people who want to be in a relationship with someone who is very gentle, soft, and easily manipulated. That takes less time to figure out because they aren’t expecting that I am not easy to manipulate and will figure them out in a few hours usually. This frustrates me so much because people think that because I am gentle I was never hurt (I’ve literally had people say, ‘I’m so worried about you. You’d be so easy to hurt.’) and not that I was really badly hurt and stitched myself back together. But it’s like you can see these people going around trying to find someone who is not aware of how they are operating. (I recommend being very wary of anyone who says they want to ‘protect you...’ because you’re so ‘soft’ or ‘kind’ early on, especially!)

aries ⇢ are you an impulsive person?

Yes. I tend to say yes to most things too. I’ve had a lot of very interesting experiences because of it. I’ve seen Cirque du Soleil, gone to Greece, spent a week alone in the countryside, all on very fast decisions. But I also know who I am and I know what I want, so it’s easy for me to make quick decisions. I can’t think of something I’ve done impulsively that I have regretted very much

1H ⇢ describe your style

Quite a bit historical, I suppose. I like long, flowing fabrics. I love greens and blues. It’s a bit ‘Viking age’, it’s definitely a bit Elven, it’s most certainly ‘would I disappear into the woods in this?’ I grew up running around in the woods. I want to blend in. I like the drama of the wind making my clothes and hair fly. Either that or I’m dressed like a farm boy. I’m not into historical clothing as like ‘historically accurate’ though. I just like stealing parts I like for my clothes.

#txt #asks #ask games #about me #mathom-box #long post

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astrxlis-archive · 2 years

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Hello again, Fox!! 😍 I have answered the quizzes you linked. I also included some of my thoughts :)

my results for the quizzes you linked!:

1. which (unhealthy) coping mechanism are you [link] - we basically have the same result but i'm still linking it

2. how do you love [link]

- my only comment for this is: i dont know if i get it or not 🤣 if you have an idea, please do tell me how you understood it. no but most of the time, some uquiz results would be poetic but also confusing like it's just there to make you like the standing person emoji xD HOWEVER! the "...smallest of gazes..." called me out because. because yeah 😭 i. i like mutual pining. hahaha. haha.

3. which folklore song are you? [link]

- this. this is so true for me. i like sunrises. i just dont know about the tarot thingy bc it's like astrology to me- very confusing and there's reversed card stuff with new meanings like can someone teach me this so i could have a new fixation even if i dont believe in it xD

4. what kind of book ending would i write for you? [link]

- my thoughts on your result: i could... feel the sense of an dystopian setting like nier's. there's so much that you've gone through, so much that you have lost which made you almost lost yourself in the process. then there's this last last one thing you will lose in the story. something you might be probably holding on for too long, or holding on you for too long. the road was rough, and you're tired. the suffocation vanished the moment "this" certain thing left you in peace. you never felt joy from losing something after so many years. you're alone, but you've find your peace and breathable freedom.

- about my results this time: man. it was funny at first because i cant swim but around the latter half silence surrounded me and i teared up a bit. because i always feel like im already spoiling my self with validation from others to "heal" my wounds but those words feel so nice to read. it feels like an ointment. 👌

5. where does your fear reside in your body? [link]

- Fox, please let me give you a hug :<

— 🍰.

helloooo 🍰❣️

sorry this took so long, my finals are approaching and i got hit by a really bad depressive episode 🫠 anyway!

about result 1: man🧍imo it takes a lot of courage to feel the big scary emotions. i shut them down mostly bc i don't have time for them, which is not very healthy 😂 do you think the result is accurate for you?

about result 2: dude this result is beautiful???? hello???? i think it's a way to say you're also more of an action instead of words type of person, and that your actions are also more "intense", but in a good way. that's my understanding of it, so feel free to disagree 😂 it's a very poetic result indeed. also, mutual pining huh? interesting.......

about result 3: it fits you very well!!! i can't help you with the tarot thing bc i don't really believe in it but at the same time it feels... off? to me 😅 idk how to explain it. but good luck with learning it if you get the chance to!!

about result 4: dude, i both love and hate how spot on you are in your interpretation of my result. it's kind of what i'm going through right now? i havent found the thing causing this whole mess yet, but like 🧍,,,,, about your result, though. first of all, i'm really glad you got the happy ending!!!!! it made me smile when i read the title bc it absolutely fits you!! and like you, i read it and teared up. i hope you know it's ok to be tired of giving, and its ok to be "selfish" and want things for yourself (even if its not really being selfish, but being human). its also ok to want external validation. we crave it bc we want to know we're doing well. it's normal. especially after being hurt. healing is a b tch, and it's hard, and having someone to cheer you on is so important 🥺 its ok to stop pulling people to the shore and just let yourself be pulled to it as well, whether by someone else or by the currents. you deserve a happy ending, dear 🥰🥰 and a happy middle as well!!

about result 5: you,,, got such a normal fear response?? i'm happy for you but at the same time i'm jealous? 😂 do those things fascinate you? or do they just terrify you? 👀

as for your request:

sorry for how long it took for this reply, expect more to come soon ❣️

see you soon!!!

#—new mail !#—the burrow's 🍰#whimsical is such a pretty word ehehehehe #i could use a hug right now #actually i can always use a hug bc my love language is physical touch my dude

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says-the-thief-to-the-piper2 · 6 years

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CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman

Adapted from the Caltech commencement address given in 1974.

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world. Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was. At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky shore below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me. One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?" I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating. That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon. But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress-- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals. Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts. So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science. I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea Islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never explicitly say what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition. In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest, it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will-- including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with. We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science. A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes didn't land--but they don't land. We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that. I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing--and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision. One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results. I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish it at all. That's not giving scientific advice. Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this--it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A. I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person--to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know that the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control. She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens. Nowadays there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous (?) field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen" he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands. All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using--not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science. Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms--and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments--they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the parapsychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated--that you can do again and get the same effect--statistically, even. They run a million rats no, it's people this time they do a lot of things and get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science? This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of the things they have to do is be sure they only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent-- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching--to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity. So I have just one wish for you--the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

Return to Donald Simanek’s home page.

#words

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