Saturday, May 10, 2014

Stay With Me.. Just.. Stay With Me Here

First things first: I believe psychic abilities exist. Now that most (all?) of you have stopped reading allow me to clarify. I do not believe that those popular television 'psychics' use psychic abilities at all in their highly edited and tricky programs. I don't believe in the websites that predict you are going do die on X date. I believe that psychic abilities 1) relate to our failed perspective of time and 2) are often explained away as intuition.

Second things second: I use tarot cards. Now that the rest of you (all?) have stopped reading, let me clarify yet again. Of course there are scam artists that exist which, sadly, are the most popular and instantly recognizable tarot card practitioners. They are usually about as credible as the aforementioned television "psychics." Second most popular are the witch-type figures who are showcased in creepy late-night movies who typically will tell you that you will meet a dark stranger next Tuesday or, alternatively, you will die. Personally, I do not use the cards this way, I use them to create a conversation to shift a perspective on an issue and more often than not, they have helped me in uncanny ways. But more about this later.

So. Now that nobody trusts anything I have to say or think, let's continue!

1) Our Failed Perspective of Time

Scientists understand that we don't really understand the concept of time.. Some say that it is circular, some say it is multi-directional, some say it is a mass of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. Altogether, they do seem to agree that how we perceive time (past, present, future, all straight in a line) is probably wrong.

2) Intuition, Exactly

That said, let us blame our brain on how we perceive time, since the presence of memories implies that things happened in the past. What if some people had a part of their brain (like the temporal lobe, for memory) that is able to access things that have not yet happened? For instance, I wrote about in my earlier late night ramble about feminism, my psychic moment of convincing my husband to not get onto the train in Japan, without being able to provide a reasonable explanation (until my brother showed up 10 minutes later). There, I attributed it to intuition being heightened by being in a strange place and PMSing, but what if it intuition IS this ability to access things that have not yet happened yet? What exactly is intuition, scientifically speaking, anyway?

I personally believe that intuition is a skill that can be honed. I believe the same thing of psychic ability, and both feel exactly the same when they occur (in my personal experience).

3) Tarot Cards

I've already explained that I use Tarot to shift perspectives, and sometimes (a lot of the time) this ends up with cannily accurate explanations for future events. Personally, I believe that Tarot taps into the aforementioned intuition/psychic skills by displacing the decisions onto interpretations of cards. Intuition is only reliable when there is no personal element of emotion involved, and the cards offer themselves as the perfect 3rd party to talk to/with/about in order to draw it out.

Obviously, I am no scientist. Obviously, I am a bit weird. However, the long and the short of it is, I do not believe that just because scientists do not have an explanation for psychics or 'hippy' or 'witchcraft' things doesn't mean that they don't exist, aren't valid, or that they can't ever eventually be explained by science itself! It's a big ol' universe out there and we can't hope to learn all about it if we automatically put our blinders on to things that seem weird (and our wonder of which scam artists have taken advantage). Plus, using intuition and psychic abilities as synonyms, this means that anyone can be psychic, there can be varying levels of psychic talent, and might even prove some theories of perception of time.

Or I could just need some sleep. What are your (kind, nonjudgmental) thoughts?

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