Another aspect, which intrigues me greatly when looking at someone's personal truth or belief, is how much (or how little) conscious intention is used to produce the result needed to make the result resonate with the individual's reality.
Building on Wiseman and he's ability to achieve something that sits well with his believe system we can look at another experiment which produced a similar affect. However, like I said at the start, the intrigue for me lies in the question of how much conscious intention is used to achieve what is expected by the viewer.
This is a watered down version of an article that can be found here.
http://www.sheldrake.org/controversies/wiseman.htmlThe experiment is based on whether dogs know when an owner is coming home conducted by Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake had managed to get some pretty amazing results so it was only natural that a more sceptical person should try the experiment too...
Quote:When my experiments with the dog Jaytee were first publicized in Britain in 1994, journalists sought out a skeptic to comment on them, and Richard Wiseman was an obvious choice...
...With the help of his assistant, Matthew Smith, he did four experiments with Jaytee, two in June and two in December 1995, and in all of them Jaytee went to the window to wait for Pam when she was indeed on the way home. As in my own experiments, he sometimes went to the window at other times, for example to bark at passing cats, but he was at the window far more when Pam was on her way home than when she was not...
...When Wiseman's data were plotted on graphs, they showed essentially the same pattern as my own. In other words Wiseman replicated my own results...
...I was astonished to hear that in the summer of 1996 Wiseman went to a series of conferences, including the World Skeptics Congress, announcing that he had refuted the 'psychic pet' phenomenon. He said Jaytee had failed his tests because he had gone to the window before Pam set off to come home...
...In September 1996 I met Wiseman and pointed out that his data showed the same pattern as my own, and that far from refuting the effect I had observed, his results confirmed it. I gave him copies of graphs showing may own data and the data from the experiments that he and Smith conducted with Jaytee. But he ignored these facts. He reiterated his negative conclusions in a paper he submitted to the British Journal of Psychology ...
...I confess that I am amazed by his persistence in this deception.
So, as you see from this article, the boundaries of intention are unclear when expanding the critical reviews of Wiseman to two experiments.
The ability of the conscious to resonant with similar concepts, beliefs, feelings is truly amazing to me. Bruce seems to experience this resonance of the similar/familiar during his travels. Max's Hell seems a good example of this to me.
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