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PARANORMAL THINKING — OUR SEVENTH SENSE

The five physical senses are like bees bringing honey to the hive. The raw data is then processed by our mind, which interprets the meaning of the raw data to determine what we should do or not do about it. Most people don't consider thoughts or the thinking from which they arise as a sense, but I encourage you to think of normal thinking as our sixth sense, and para-normal thinking as our seventh sense.

Conscious and unconscious states of your body-mind are emergent, contingent, and impermanent phenomenon. Neither has some magical capacity to break free from the field of events out of which it springs. The mind, conscious or unconscious, is a function of the neural activities of your brain. With that in mind, here's a brief look at the conscious and unconscious types of physical and mental states.

UNCONSCIOUS

Asleep... normal, everyday state of not being connected to our physical senses but connected to our mental sense of thinking in the form of dreams.

Anesthetized... abnormal, drug-induced state during surgery when we are not aware of our physical senses but potentially aware of our mental sense in the form of out-of-body or near-death experiences.

Knocked Out... disconnected from our physical senses as a result of a head injury. Most have no memory of their thoughts in this state and many have no memory of what happened.

Drugged out... disconnected from our physical senses as a result of drinking, smoking, snorting or injecting too much of an intoxicating or psychedelic substance. Thoughts in this state are sometimes remembered as strange dreams.

CONSCIOUS

Awake... normal, everyday state of being connected to all five physical senses (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches) and our sixth, mental sense (thoughts).

Hypnotized... quasi connection to the physical sense of sound in that we can hear the hypnotist's questions and give him or her an answer, but strongly connected to our sense of thought in that we can remember details of a past event with enhanced clarity and detail.

Drugged... physical and mental senses are distorted as a result of drinking, smoking, snorting or injecting too much of an intoxicating or psychedelic substance. Thoughts in this state are typically hallucinations and can reoccur during normal, everyday activities when not under the immediate influence of a drug.

Meditating... minimal connection to our physical senses but enhanced awareness of our sense of self to free the mind and body from the concerns of daily life.

Pyschic Perception... mental awareness that occurs independently of our physical senses.

Some people refer to psychic, extrasensory perception (ESP) as the sixth sense, but I refer to thinking as the sixth sense, because it's in the chain of normal, everyday cause and effect relationships between the mind (mental thoughts) and the body (physical senses). So it makes sense (pun intended) for me to refer to extrasensory perceptions as our seventh sense, because ESP is a very different kind of thinking and awareness. ESP is not connected to the normal physical and mindful senses of everyday life. It's a para-normal relationship between two minds.

We know how sensory information is transmitted to the brain but not how it is transformed into consciousness. Light reflected from a bird, for example, enters my eyes, then travels through the optic nerve to my brain where the image is interpreted (understood) as a bird. But we do not know how extrasensory information is transmitted from one brain to another, nor how the information is transformed into conscious awareness that my daughter, for example, has had a car accident on the other side of town. Instead of trying to understand how it happens, we should be glad it does, because the experience can call attention to our connectedness and therefore change our behavior toward each other in a positive way.

The evolution of the human brain brought conscious awareness of self, and that made it possible to manage our lives with our intellect (conscious understanding) rather than with our instincts (unconscious reactions). Despite the technological advances that knowledge has brought to humans, we tend to be competitive, selfish and aggressive. Survival of the Fittest is frequently used to explain and justify that kind of behavior. Left-wing politicians believe our selfish, territorial behavior is unchangeable, so they favor rules and regulations that force people to behave in politically correct ways.

Normal Science can explain how sensory information from our five senses is transmitted through our central nervous system to our brain where it's transformed into a conscious awareness of what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. The process is a repeatable, verifiable fact, not a randomly occurring, unverifiable mystery. That's why normal scientists reject any explanation of how information is transmitted from Jane's consciousness to Joe's consciousness and identify all psychic experiences as myths, fairy tales, hallucinations and, depending on the scientist's religious beliefs, divine exceptions to the laws of nature.

The laws of normal science address quantifiable phenomena because you can assign meaningful numbers to the results of empirical tests. And normal science investigates causal phenomena — effects that follow causes and results of experiments that are repeatable for anyone regardless of where or when they perform the test.

Paranormal scientists identify psychic experiences as phenomena beyond the known laws of nature. So the laws of paranormal science address phenomena that are neither quantifiable, repeatable nor causal. You can't assign numbers to the intensity of emotions or measure the distance between a feeling and a memory; psychic experiences are never the same twice; and their effect often precedes its cause.

So the laws for normal and paranormal phenomena are different. The dynamics of how an apple falls from a tree, for example, can only be explained by the laws of normal science. The dynamics of how Bob, who lives in Arizona, knows that his daughter, who lives in new York, has had an accident can only be explained by the laws of paranormal science.

Paranormal scientists want to make paranormal phenomena more widely accepted because that will enhance people's awareness of their connectedness and improve their behavior toward each other. That's why paranormal scientists think outside the box of normal science to find a rational extrapolation from facts acquired through empirical evidence to facts acquired from experience. That's why they encourage one another to stop trying to prove the existence of psychic experiences and get on with studying its properties.

We can communicate electronically with satellites at great distances from Earth, so it seems plausible that we can feel the electrical vibrations emanating from the mind of someone standing right next to us. People who live together, for example, frequently have similar thoughts at the same time, saying, "I knew you were going to say that." Or we think about someone and that person calls us, saying, "I was just thinking about you." I don't think this is a coincidence. I think our little radio stations are simply receiving each other.