How often do you attempt to use preternatural abilities on the world around you?
How often do you attempt to use preternatural abilities on the world around you?
I am one with the Force and the Force is with me.
If I’m in a mirthful mood, sometimes I will wave my hands in a magical gesture, causing the door to open before me, as I enter the grocery store.
All the time. I know it's not real, but it's fun to try to predict when exactly the bus is gonna come. It's right after this blue car! ... well, okay, maybe it's right after this white car! oh...
There's my people! Forget these party poopers. How do you know you can't spark fire from your fingertips, or make an icicle fall just by concentrating on it if you never try?
True --- you can't prove the thing that already happened had nothing to do with me thinking real hard about it!
I occasionally feel the need to crush some heads.
Careful or I'll be forced to smoosh your face!
There is... NOBODY HOME!
Taking a cat bowl full of water back to its spot on the floor. I remember I am the water, and it gets delivered without spilling.
I regularly use my gifts to open grocery store doors.
Made me laugh. Thanks.
Myself never, but there probably ... millions? tens of millions? of tiktok brained Americans that believe in 'manifesting', so being irrationally delusional is pretty trendy right now I guess.
Manifesting is a thing, though. It's not magic, but it is a way to trigger the placebo effect which is an observed phenomenon.
I can't manifest a jet, but I can manifest a new car. Just by believing I'm going to get one somehow, my brain is going to start doing a lot of subconscious things that are going to add up to getting one. You can manifest a promotion and you will start to work a little harder or more efficiently, maybe add new skills.
Why not just -do- these things? If you can, great! But if not, your subconscious is capable of things your conscious may not be... You could be in a cycle of self sabotage that manifestation can sidestep, for instance.
It's an incredibly powerful tool that people disregard as woowoo because even the people selling it don't know how it works.
Yep, no hoodoo involved. You can brainwash yourself, make things happen. One time dad lost a shitload of weight after I hadn't seen him for a long time. "I brainwashed myself into believing that being hungry was a good feeling."
I think you're the only person I've seen in forum posts that actually gets it.
Wait wait.
Its... an incredibly powerful tool, but people don't know how it works.
But also it works by triggering the placebo effect.
Ok so can you show me maybe something like a scientific study that shows that manifesting practitioners have a 'powerful', measurable, meaningfully different ... any kind of outcome whatsoever, compared to non manifesters?
Is there evidence that manifesting actually triggers the placebo effect, as you claim it does?
You dont manifest a new car. You either make a plan to figure out how to acquire one, and it either works or it doesnt, or maybe you get lucky and you get gifted one by a friend, or you randomly encounter a scenario where you stumble across a great deal.
Compare the number of people who are manifesting that they want a car and end up with a car and the number of people who are manifesting a car and do not end up with a car vs non manifesters who do and do not end up with a car, in a given timeframe.
Im not aware of any studies on something like this because the notion is dubious on its face, not even having a proposed causal mechanism as you say.
But I would be very strongly inclined to believe that if a such a study were done, what you'd end up with is that manifesting has no statistically significant relationship to acquiring a car, and probably something like overall income or wealth and maybe number of fairly wealthy friends/family do actually have observable effects.
Look I totally am for a reasonable amount of positive self affirmation and self confidence.
But manifesting takes it to literally absurd lengths.
Pulling my dad's finger always made him fart. Definitely not normal to have your finger connected to a pressure relief valve in your ass.
Only in moments of extreme crisis.
please don't die please don't die please don't die
I often try to pull things toward me or send out damaging rays but it has literally never worked
Yet.
Weekly. If there's ever a time for magical thinking, its during TTRPG sessions. Those funny math rocks will obey me one of these days, then its gonna be nothing but nat 20s until the end of time.
But that'll get boring after a while. Plus people will call you a cheater.
i appreciate your confidence in my ability to actually wizard up some d20 rolls
Every time I try, I swear I only rolls 1s. In a sense, that's a pretty special ability too. 🤪
A few times a year
When I was a teen I was pretty much like Silent Bob in Mallrats but now my spirit is broken.
May the cosmos revitalize that spirit of yours.
watch the documentary 'the matrix is broken'.
Not since I had major chuunibyo 10 years ago. Why, what kind of preternatural abilities are you using, OP?
I practice Chaos Magick. Since beginning my practice, I've noticed that things usually go my way. Not always, but I get what I want so often- and in such unlikely circumstances- that it's hard for me to just call it random chance.
The thing about it, though, is that there is no empirical evidence for it. Some people, like myself, have no problem accepting that we can't explain everything with science and data and math. Other people like to call themselves superior because they only believe what they can see for themselves.
It's arrogant to the point of hubris to think there's nothing beyond our physical reality. And, frankly, when all reality really is is a bunch of randomly vibrating particles, I don't think that inducing a change in conformity with one's will is that far fetched.
Do you know about confirmation bias? That our brain is looking for positive example for something, and actively ignores the negative examples or gives them less weight?
What would interest me is, if there theoretically was absolute proof that there is no such thing as Chaos Magick, would you stop doing it? Or would you dismiss such proof?
I do know about confirmation bias. Maybe that's what is going on, but from my own perspective I don't think so. Course if it was I guess I'd still feel that way 🤔
If there was absolute proof that it was a waste of time I'd probably keep my decor because it's all black pentagrams and shit and it's metal as fuck, but Bizzle don't dismiss evidence just because it disagrees with my worldview. I'm a weirdo, not a conservative 😂 Fortunately for my practice it's pretty hard to prove that something doesn't exist.
As a counterpoint, if there was absolute proof of things beyond our physical reality- whether it's Chaos Magick or the Universal Consciousness/God or even something as mundane as higher spacial dimensions, would you accept it? Or would you keep your eyes closed to the truth? Honestly the more we find out about the fundamental nature of reality the more convinced I am of the supernatural.
Your senses take in more data that you could possibly consciously process. There is an unconscious portion of the mind that does a first pass on the raw data (excitations of the rods and cones in your eyes, of your eardrums, chemical receptors in your nose, etc), and processes it into concepts that your conscious mind can process (images, sounds, smells, etc), and that you personally find significance in (your friend's face, your favorite song, your partner's perfume).
Confirmation bias isn't proof against Chaos Magick, it's precisely the mechanism that makes it work. The raw data is the chaos, training your subconscious to attach value to particular concepts is the magick. It's nothing more than repeatedly assigning value to something in a ritualistic way, to train the raw-data-processing part of your mind to trigger the conscious part when the object of value is present in a large batch of data.
It's like recognizing your friend's face in a crowd out of the corner of your eye, or when you notice every car on the road that's the same make and model as your own. Chaos Magick isn't about creating something from nothing, it's about training your subconscious to recognize and alert you to what's already there, hidden in the chaos.
I think you mean supernatural. Preternatural means it's possible but just beyond what's expected. Supernatural is stuff like ghosts or the Force.