This article demonstrates the silliness of trying to explain everything through "science". It's laughable. No offense, but this is such an ignorant Western way of thinking which needs to be finally added to antiquity. Reality isn't merely what we can see and measure with physical instruments. Reality goes deep into the unknown, the subconscious, the collective consciousness etc etc. Simply watching a murmuration of birds should be enough to demonstrate that. What we see and "know" through "science" BARELY causes a ripple on the surface of the endlessly deep and invisible experience of being a living creature.
Whilst I agree that the scientific perspective is not the only way to think to suggest that it is an "ignorant Western way of thinking" that should be consigned to antiquity is a bit of a shame. That does seem a little bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Mind you babies do tend to be self centred mini black holes of egotistical need into which all of your money, sanity and, when they reach adulthood, all of your best whiskey, disappear.
I recall a grapefruit diet pill advertisement of the '80's, which inadvertently cited Heidegger: "There's been some heavy research into grapefruit, and when you're talking science, you're talking results".
Heidegger, if I remember correctly, wrote that "science" would be abandoned once it had found its fruit in technology.
When in a dull lectures, i would frequently stare at a person's back sitting a few rows in front of ne. Usually, I could get them to turn around. Luckily my PhD program had several professors interested in Energy. Love Shelldrake. His books are I threshing, creative and timely. Thanks so much for this article. I have experienced success in hands on healing and there are more applications to energizing food, etc. Is this part of why prayers before eating is so popular.
Sheldrake is a fascinating character , a kind of scientific prophet who disrupts The Science regularly. He has interesting things to say about water and how it 'remembers' as well. Worth a read...
Yea it all seems a bit weird but you never know. Here is what happened to me. Don't laugh, it really did happen.
A good long time ago, some 45years or so, I was working on a small building site in the countryside. I was standing and working at a bench that I had made up and concentrating on what I was making. I am a carpenter and joiner by trade and as a general principle you will find that carpenters have excellent powers of concentration, far better than bricklayers and infinitely superior to plumbers and electricians. It may have been this concentration of focus upon the task in hand that was a salient factor in what happened next.
What happened was that I got an odd feeling that I was being watched by someone behind me. I tried to stop myself but I just had to look, so I did. No one there. Carried on working. The feeling of being watched persisted so I looked again. Again, nothing there and then I glanced downwards and saw the cause of the whole episode. Staring up at me with a steady unblinking gaze was a ferret and as soon as I saw it I knew why I had felt surveyed.
Yes, really, a ferret. Looked like a tame one, probably used for catching rabbits. My mate, the builder whose job it was, used to go ferreting for rabbits so he took it. As far as I know it did all right for him. Country ways. Country ways.
I don't like all that green stuff myself; if I see too much grass I have to suck on an exhaust pipe to feel normal again.
I love this and have thought something similar (obviously with zero research and no investigation!) But I suspect it is based in truth and that the only real problem is that the human version is now so unused and regressed that it is almost imperceptible in most people; maybe even some sensitive people are more 'tuned-in'. Much that we'd probably say 'oh, it was nothing', or 'what a coincidence' is probably more than we think.
Charles Tart, a paranormal researcher in CA, discusses "sheep and goat experiments" in his book The End of Materialism. People's deeply held beliefs have statistically significant effects on random number generators, and the fiercer the belief, the more deeply held, the more the influence. Should this be replicable, and even experiments are subject to experimenter belief and expectation, so the research must be gold standard blinded, it has implications for what kind of a world we are creating with our beliefs. If we say there is a force in the cosmos against human flourishing, then, speculatively, that force (human or metaphysical or alien or whatever) would want us to refuse realms of experience and perception that lead to flourishing, seems to me. Science is materialist reductionist in what is considered its highest form or state, and if an individual strays from those axiomatic presuppositions, woe unto him or her. Jordan Peterson was interviewing Matt Ridley and asked him about religion, and just the mention made Ridley go into half rigor mortis, as just the whiff of that taints scientists, the sleep of reason producing monsters supposedly, but look where that's got us!
I appreciate the reference to Goya's etching -- I have long felt that the sleep of intuition was rather more to be feared. His etching I prefer is that of the playful idiot-Goliath confronting a normal scale couple in which, if I recall correctly, the man is cowering behind the woman.
It's hard to pay attention, for me, since I'm always "checking my 6:00", but when I peer at something too intently, I'm almost invariably zapped by someone willing to comment.
Part of the reason I'm uncomfortable around demonstrative dogs is that "they can sense when you're afraid" -- which is small consolation. I recall the author's reference to the relative clairvoyance of children.
I am totally blind, and remember to experiences of being looked at intently: the first when I confronted my aunt at Thanksgiving with “what are you looking at?“ To which she expressed surprise that I noticed, then said she couldn’t believe I was eating all that, then second, while at a friend’s, in the night suddenly awoke to the sensation of being stared at by something I knew was not human: it was like a vacuum! Found out later that her seven cats were sitting just staring.
I recall Dante's careful description, in Purgatory, of blind men, implying his own close observation of the blind. The protagonist then hastens to look away from them to continue his journey, with the suggestion that it is rude to stare. I once had the privilege of watching a man read braille on a train, but he must have been used to being looked at, since he seemed not to notice my attention; or maybe he was also reading The Divine Comedy, which is pretty engrossing.
Thank you for providing this-- I read the whole article from the Daily Mail (8 Dec. '23).
It leads me to wonder, if images could/can be projected out (cf the mirror analogy), then why not thoughts? I have, over more than four decades, been aware of thoughts joining, perhaps flow in between, two people who are intimately connected.
Exempli gratia:
--My mother-in-law with “someone who was close to me”—specifics she did not offer.
--Between my non-verbal toddler and me: I had asked her what she wanted for lunch--into my mind came --immediately-- an image of an egg--the very same image, labelled “egg", found in her favorite board book. But I myself do not “think” in images, I think in words. So, huh? And when I asked, "Would you like an egg?", I received that kind of all-body happy physical response, such as only a non-verbal toddler can give.
--Between my mother and me: my mother waking very early, about 5:30, too uneasy to go back sleep, remaining unsettled until about 3:30—which time happened to coincide with the start of my labor until the time of my daughter’s birth. I was 600 miles away; my mother did not know what was going on in my body until my husband called to announce the birth. Just a little add-on that that child was named for my mother—the name having been chosen months before but known to none but ourselves.
--Between that same daughter and me: last June, as I felt moved to pray hourly for the safety of the babies in her womb, --and asking her sisters to join me in this--to learn 12 hours later that she had then been about to go into labor. [Babies were born healthy and heavy.]
For 51 years now I have lived with a research physicist (fiber optics) --and thus try to follow a logical path in my thinking; yet he and I have too, too many times experienced situations --very physical affairs-- which we cannot explain rationally. We just wink at each other and accept these “experiences”.
So, I am inclined to think that there’s a whole whopping lot of ‘science’ yet undiscovered. As a Latin teacher I am conscious that ‘science’ (sciens, scientis) means ‘knowing’ (or, if you wish, “scientas, scientatis”, ‘the state of knowing’). So what is it before the knowing arrives? Does ‘it’ simply not exist? Had you tried to explain a smart phone to a relatively clever fellow in 1835, how far would you get? Or a telegraph to someone in 1555?
Re: the author's mention of the keener sensitivity of children to being watched. This is not precisely the same thing, but more like the ESP to which you were referring.
At work, I walked by a television set, ending up riveted for a couple of minutes to a History Channel offering about a uniquely Soviet era series of experimental "ground effect" aircraft.
As soon as I arrived home, my younger son, a three year old, rushed to show me his newest Lego creation, holding up an aircraft identical in planform to that I had seen on a screen several miles away.
Does this apply to cats? Was on the second floor of my house undressing for bed. Had a feeling of being uncomfortable something, was wrong. Turned and looked, there sitting on a window ledge was a cat, watching me.
When I’m walking my dog in the woods, I’m often surprised that I can just look straight to the point where a deer is staring at me. I’ve always assumed that they were moving and just froze still when they saw me and that I detected the stop in movement, but maybe they’d been staring at me awhile. I’m notorious for not being able to see what’s in front of me and often accused of not being very observant, so I’m always thrilled when I do spot a deer. For all I know they could be there everyday and I’m mostly missing them!
Goes the other way round, too. When deer hunting from a blind or other hide I find it helps considerably to keep my eyes down and not look directly at any deer that comes into my proximity (until it's time to aim) -- otherwise they also become alerted that someone is looking at them, get nervous, and then shy off. Then, of course, many women seem to almost immediately pick up on the fact when some man is looking at them. Evolutionary advantage in both cases to having this ability, no doubt.
There have been a few times in my life where I had the sensation of being watched and being able to turn and centre on the person staring at me. Why should we be any different than the other animals we share the planet with, I think we all have some unknown sense that can manifest for no apparent reason and maybe it is a survival instinct from our distant past and surfaces when we are tuned in to it.
Evolution is NOT fact but a THEORY...please correct your article when referring...it is a man -made THEORY of Evolution. We humans are already an amazing self -regulating, self-replication machine with a 120 year shelf life....of course we have dormant abilities....we are electrical beings, produce it and of course direct it! Fascinating and fun article...
I have felt starlink satellites ‘looking at me’. Asleep outside I suddenly awoke, feeling “something is up, something is up! and feeling like a predator was about. I sat up and looked around and still had the feeling yet could not sense anything nearby…and just then the string of starlink satellites came into my field of vision directly over my head, moving away.
I have no expertise of any kind in the field but I know enough about quantum mechanics to be sure that we do not fully understand it and major shifts in knowledge may occur that challenge basic concepts of reality. This article makes me think of the concept of quantum entanglement (e.g. the Shcrodinger's cat experiment which has a more subtle meaning than many people first assume, it is not that the cat is neither alive or dead, it is that it is both at the same time, either split realities or at least temporarily split wave forms).
If observation has the power to collapse wave forms into a specific 'reality' it suggests, to me, that observation, the sensory awareness of a consciousness to an object or another consciousness, operates on both the quantum and higher levels of physical reality.
If this is the case then there is a possibility that we are aware on some subconscious level of changes in our own quantum state when being observed. When unobserved we operate in a limbic state unbound to a shared reality, but someone observing us, even indirectly, links our consciousness directly to their reality. If our minds/souls (whatever element rides through our brains, limbic and endocrine systems, and other physical trappings) is in some way a quantum processor, capable of processing emergent realities or wave forms, when two of these objects interact, even via observation, it might trigger feedback - on the quantum level - of the same kind as when two acoustic devices are brought close together.
I’ve had this phenomenon happen to me on numerous occasions. This particular time, the phenomenon happened whilst walking in Salem, MA. I haven’t forgotten about it, because it involved an animal not a human. I was standing with my back to a building, about 30 feet behind me. My friend and I were discussing what we were going to do next. All of a sudden I turned to her and said something is staring at the back of my head. My friend turned first and said there’s no one there; I said I’m still feeling it. I turned and looked and I didn’t see anybody either, but then I looked at the building and sitting in the window was a cat. I only wish I could share the picture of this cat, because it looked like it had laser beams for eyes. It was such an intense looking animal. I walked closer to the building and took a photo of it. If I could, I would insert it into this comment section.
Invariably the person I am drawing will start to fidget and then move away, sometimes they look right at me, sometimes they just make their getaway, but they clearly feel uncomfortable. This must be why life drawing models are so valued!
This article demonstrates the silliness of trying to explain everything through "science". It's laughable. No offense, but this is such an ignorant Western way of thinking which needs to be finally added to antiquity. Reality isn't merely what we can see and measure with physical instruments. Reality goes deep into the unknown, the subconscious, the collective consciousness etc etc. Simply watching a murmuration of birds should be enough to demonstrate that. What we see and "know" through "science" BARELY causes a ripple on the surface of the endlessly deep and invisible experience of being a living creature.
Whilst I agree that the scientific perspective is not the only way to think to suggest that it is an "ignorant Western way of thinking" that should be consigned to antiquity is a bit of a shame. That does seem a little bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Mind you babies do tend to be self centred mini black holes of egotistical need into which all of your money, sanity and, when they reach adulthood, all of your best whiskey, disappear.
So perhaps you are right.
Throw all the babies away and keep the bathwater.
I recall a grapefruit diet pill advertisement of the '80's, which inadvertently cited Heidegger: "There's been some heavy research into grapefruit, and when you're talking science, you're talking results".
Heidegger, if I remember correctly, wrote that "science" would be abandoned once it had found its fruit in technology.
When in a dull lectures, i would frequently stare at a person's back sitting a few rows in front of ne. Usually, I could get them to turn around. Luckily my PhD program had several professors interested in Energy. Love Shelldrake. His books are I threshing, creative and timely. Thanks so much for this article. I have experienced success in hands on healing and there are more applications to energizing food, etc. Is this part of why prayers before eating is so popular.
Sheldrake is a fascinating character , a kind of scientific prophet who disrupts The Science regularly. He has interesting things to say about water and how it 'remembers' as well. Worth a read...
Yea it all seems a bit weird but you never know. Here is what happened to me. Don't laugh, it really did happen.
A good long time ago, some 45years or so, I was working on a small building site in the countryside. I was standing and working at a bench that I had made up and concentrating on what I was making. I am a carpenter and joiner by trade and as a general principle you will find that carpenters have excellent powers of concentration, far better than bricklayers and infinitely superior to plumbers and electricians. It may have been this concentration of focus upon the task in hand that was a salient factor in what happened next.
What happened was that I got an odd feeling that I was being watched by someone behind me. I tried to stop myself but I just had to look, so I did. No one there. Carried on working. The feeling of being watched persisted so I looked again. Again, nothing there and then I glanced downwards and saw the cause of the whole episode. Staring up at me with a steady unblinking gaze was a ferret and as soon as I saw it I knew why I had felt surveyed.
Yes, really, a ferret. Looked like a tame one, probably used for catching rabbits. My mate, the builder whose job it was, used to go ferreting for rabbits so he took it. As far as I know it did all right for him. Country ways. Country ways.
I don't like all that green stuff myself; if I see too much grass I have to suck on an exhaust pipe to feel normal again.
My husband's a carpenter and I agree about the concentration levels.
I love this and have thought something similar (obviously with zero research and no investigation!) But I suspect it is based in truth and that the only real problem is that the human version is now so unused and regressed that it is almost imperceptible in most people; maybe even some sensitive people are more 'tuned-in'. Much that we'd probably say 'oh, it was nothing', or 'what a coincidence' is probably more than we think.
Charles Tart, a paranormal researcher in CA, discusses "sheep and goat experiments" in his book The End of Materialism. People's deeply held beliefs have statistically significant effects on random number generators, and the fiercer the belief, the more deeply held, the more the influence. Should this be replicable, and even experiments are subject to experimenter belief and expectation, so the research must be gold standard blinded, it has implications for what kind of a world we are creating with our beliefs. If we say there is a force in the cosmos against human flourishing, then, speculatively, that force (human or metaphysical or alien or whatever) would want us to refuse realms of experience and perception that lead to flourishing, seems to me. Science is materialist reductionist in what is considered its highest form or state, and if an individual strays from those axiomatic presuppositions, woe unto him or her. Jordan Peterson was interviewing Matt Ridley and asked him about religion, and just the mention made Ridley go into half rigor mortis, as just the whiff of that taints scientists, the sleep of reason producing monsters supposedly, but look where that's got us!
I appreciate the reference to Goya's etching -- I have long felt that the sleep of intuition was rather more to be feared. His etching I prefer is that of the playful idiot-Goliath confronting a normal scale couple in which, if I recall correctly, the man is cowering behind the woman.
It's hard to pay attention, for me, since I'm always "checking my 6:00", but when I peer at something too intently, I'm almost invariably zapped by someone willing to comment.
Could it be that when we look at someone, our thoughts are directed towards them, and it is our "thought mass" that they are sensing?
Part of the reason I'm uncomfortable around demonstrative dogs is that "they can sense when you're afraid" -- which is small consolation. I recall the author's reference to the relative clairvoyance of children.
Yes, I think the "sensing when you're afraid" applies to wild animals as well.
I am totally blind, and remember to experiences of being looked at intently: the first when I confronted my aunt at Thanksgiving with “what are you looking at?“ To which she expressed surprise that I noticed, then said she couldn’t believe I was eating all that, then second, while at a friend’s, in the night suddenly awoke to the sensation of being stared at by something I knew was not human: it was like a vacuum! Found out later that her seven cats were sitting just staring.
I recall Dante's careful description, in Purgatory, of blind men, implying his own close observation of the blind. The protagonist then hastens to look away from them to continue his journey, with the suggestion that it is rude to stare. I once had the privilege of watching a man read braille on a train, but he must have been used to being looked at, since he seemed not to notice my attention; or maybe he was also reading The Divine Comedy, which is pretty engrossing.
Thank you for providing this-- I read the whole article from the Daily Mail (8 Dec. '23).
It leads me to wonder, if images could/can be projected out (cf the mirror analogy), then why not thoughts? I have, over more than four decades, been aware of thoughts joining, perhaps flow in between, two people who are intimately connected.
Exempli gratia:
--My mother-in-law with “someone who was close to me”—specifics she did not offer.
--Between my non-verbal toddler and me: I had asked her what she wanted for lunch--into my mind came --immediately-- an image of an egg--the very same image, labelled “egg", found in her favorite board book. But I myself do not “think” in images, I think in words. So, huh? And when I asked, "Would you like an egg?", I received that kind of all-body happy physical response, such as only a non-verbal toddler can give.
--Between my mother and me: my mother waking very early, about 5:30, too uneasy to go back sleep, remaining unsettled until about 3:30—which time happened to coincide with the start of my labor until the time of my daughter’s birth. I was 600 miles away; my mother did not know what was going on in my body until my husband called to announce the birth. Just a little add-on that that child was named for my mother—the name having been chosen months before but known to none but ourselves.
--Between that same daughter and me: last June, as I felt moved to pray hourly for the safety of the babies in her womb, --and asking her sisters to join me in this--to learn 12 hours later that she had then been about to go into labor. [Babies were born healthy and heavy.]
For 51 years now I have lived with a research physicist (fiber optics) --and thus try to follow a logical path in my thinking; yet he and I have too, too many times experienced situations --very physical affairs-- which we cannot explain rationally. We just wink at each other and accept these “experiences”.
So, I am inclined to think that there’s a whole whopping lot of ‘science’ yet undiscovered. As a Latin teacher I am conscious that ‘science’ (sciens, scientis) means ‘knowing’ (or, if you wish, “scientas, scientatis”, ‘the state of knowing’). So what is it before the knowing arrives? Does ‘it’ simply not exist? Had you tried to explain a smart phone to a relatively clever fellow in 1835, how far would you get? Or a telegraph to someone in 1555?
Re: the author's mention of the keener sensitivity of children to being watched. This is not precisely the same thing, but more like the ESP to which you were referring.
At work, I walked by a television set, ending up riveted for a couple of minutes to a History Channel offering about a uniquely Soviet era series of experimental "ground effect" aircraft.
As soon as I arrived home, my younger son, a three year old, rushed to show me his newest Lego creation, holding up an aircraft identical in planform to that I had seen on a screen several miles away.
Does this apply to cats? Was on the second floor of my house undressing for bed. Had a feeling of being uncomfortable something, was wrong. Turned and looked, there sitting on a window ledge was a cat, watching me.
cat burglar eyeing up your possessions.
I, and a housemate, have had the same experience several times with the neighbor's cat staring at us through the patio door.
When I’m walking my dog in the woods, I’m often surprised that I can just look straight to the point where a deer is staring at me. I’ve always assumed that they were moving and just froze still when they saw me and that I detected the stop in movement, but maybe they’d been staring at me awhile. I’m notorious for not being able to see what’s in front of me and often accused of not being very observant, so I’m always thrilled when I do spot a deer. For all I know they could be there everyday and I’m mostly missing them!
Goes the other way round, too. When deer hunting from a blind or other hide I find it helps considerably to keep my eyes down and not look directly at any deer that comes into my proximity (until it's time to aim) -- otherwise they also become alerted that someone is looking at them, get nervous, and then shy off. Then, of course, many women seem to almost immediately pick up on the fact when some man is looking at them. Evolutionary advantage in both cases to having this ability, no doubt.
There have been a few times in my life where I had the sensation of being watched and being able to turn and centre on the person staring at me. Why should we be any different than the other animals we share the planet with, I think we all have some unknown sense that can manifest for no apparent reason and maybe it is a survival instinct from our distant past and surfaces when we are tuned in to it.
Evolution is NOT fact but a THEORY...please correct your article when referring...it is a man -made THEORY of Evolution. We humans are already an amazing self -regulating, self-replication machine with a 120 year shelf life....of course we have dormant abilities....we are electrical beings, produce it and of course direct it! Fascinating and fun article...
Many, Many Thanks! And we're the only beings who do taxonomy, too.
I have felt starlink satellites ‘looking at me’. Asleep outside I suddenly awoke, feeling “something is up, something is up! and feeling like a predator was about. I sat up and looked around and still had the feeling yet could not sense anything nearby…and just then the string of starlink satellites came into my field of vision directly over my head, moving away.
This verges on "electrosensitivity" You may appreciate Arthur Firstenberg's book: The Invisible Rainbow.
What do those satellites send out exactly?
You are right about that. I had just suddenly gotten that way.
I have no expertise of any kind in the field but I know enough about quantum mechanics to be sure that we do not fully understand it and major shifts in knowledge may occur that challenge basic concepts of reality. This article makes me think of the concept of quantum entanglement (e.g. the Shcrodinger's cat experiment which has a more subtle meaning than many people first assume, it is not that the cat is neither alive or dead, it is that it is both at the same time, either split realities or at least temporarily split wave forms).
If observation has the power to collapse wave forms into a specific 'reality' it suggests, to me, that observation, the sensory awareness of a consciousness to an object or another consciousness, operates on both the quantum and higher levels of physical reality.
If this is the case then there is a possibility that we are aware on some subconscious level of changes in our own quantum state when being observed. When unobserved we operate in a limbic state unbound to a shared reality, but someone observing us, even indirectly, links our consciousness directly to their reality. If our minds/souls (whatever element rides through our brains, limbic and endocrine systems, and other physical trappings) is in some way a quantum processor, capable of processing emergent realities or wave forms, when two of these objects interact, even via observation, it might trigger feedback - on the quantum level - of the same kind as when two acoustic devices are brought close together.
V interesting.
I’ve had this phenomenon happen to me on numerous occasions. This particular time, the phenomenon happened whilst walking in Salem, MA. I haven’t forgotten about it, because it involved an animal not a human. I was standing with my back to a building, about 30 feet behind me. My friend and I were discussing what we were going to do next. All of a sudden I turned to her and said something is staring at the back of my head. My friend turned first and said there’s no one there; I said I’m still feeling it. I turned and looked and I didn’t see anybody either, but then I looked at the building and sitting in the window was a cat. I only wish I could share the picture of this cat, because it looked like it had laser beams for eyes. It was such an intense looking animal. I walked closer to the building and took a photo of it. If I could, I would insert it into this comment section.
Invariably the person I am drawing will start to fidget and then move away, sometimes they look right at me, sometimes they just make their getaway, but they clearly feel uncomfortable. This must be why life drawing models are so valued!
This is totally a thing! I like to draw people out in public places like parks.