Wanting Creates and Wanting Contaminates

The same chair holds two people who both say that the mind has primacy, and they give opposite instructions about what to do with it. One says that the mind reaches reality by wanting a thing hard enough and by feeling that thing as already accomplished [1]. The other says that precisely this wanting is the principal contaminant of whatever the mind perceives, and that the remedy is control of the overlay while the data are taken in [2]. Wanting creates in one of them and wanting contaminates in the other, and the whole disagreement is about that verb. This paper takes both of them seriously, in their own vocabulary and by their own rules. It sets out what the New Thought tradition actually instructs, because the instruction is an operating procedure and not only a promise [1]. It sets out what the controlled remote viewing manual instructs, because that instruction is a protocol against error rather than a claim about the world [2]. It then brings in the vocabulary of the ordinary laboratory, and it looks at the 1995 review of the second doctrine, in which two reviewers read the same statistics and reached different conclusions [3]. The question the paper finally answers is narrow. It is not whether consciousness can alter reality, and not whether a person can read a target by other means than looking at it. It is whether the two doctrines can both be right at once, and if they cannot, where exactly the collision happens and which of them loses the least by losing.

Doctrine A: desire as instrument

The New Thought position is usually reported in its thinnest form, as the claim that thoughts become things. Read that way it is a cosmology and there is nothing to operate. Read as its own authors wrote it, it is a machine with moving parts, and the parts can be named [1].

The machine has two terms. Neville Goddard calls them effect and cause, and he assigns each of them a place in the person. “The conscious is the realm of effect; the subconscious is the realm of cause” [4]. The conscious is therefore not the source of the action but the place where the effect is produced. The causal term lies underneath, where it cannot be inspected. That architecture does a lot of work in the rest of the system, because it makes the conscious mind a machine for supplying material to a process that runs without supervision.

The second part of the machine is that material has to be felt, because feeling is what makes it stick. Goddard states the rule without any room for interpretation: “No idea can be impressed on the subconscious until it is felt, but once felt - be it good, bad or indifferent - it must be expressed” [4]. Note the three words in the middle clause. A feeling that is bad is expressed with the same completeness as a feeling that is good. The system does not distinguish the valence of what it carries, only whether it has been felt. The manual states the rule twice: “never entertain an undesirable feeling” and “do not dwell on the imperfection of yourself or others” [4].

From the two terms follows the ontology. Goddard does not hedge it: “Consciousness is the one and only reality, not figuratively but actually” [4]. Once consciousness is granted that standing, the causal claim stops being a claim about the mind influencing the world and becomes a claim about there being nothing else to influence. A person who acts on this is not manipulating a separate reality from a distance. A person who acts on this is altering the only reality there is, from the inside, by a route that runs through the body.

What the machine lacks is any stopping condition, and the practical literature fills the gap with a technique that looks deceptively like the opposite. Wallace Wattles states the instruction in eight words. The words themselves are exact: “Give your attention wholly to riches; ignore poverty” [5]. Attention is the input, and the whole art consists in choosing its object. Wattles makes the choice concrete by asking the reader to hold a picture of a specific object as a fact rather than as a hope: “But if you want a sewing machine, hold the mental image of it with the most positive certainty that it is being made, or is on its way to you” [5]. Goddard’s answer to the same gap is sleep and prayer, which the reader is told to use until perfect self-control is attained [4].

That is an operational rule, and it is worth being precise about what it is not. It is not the rule that you will get the sewing machine by wanting it. It is the rule that you will hold one object in mind continuously, exclude everything that is not that object, and treat the mental state as an accomplished fact rather than as a request [5]. Whether the sewing machine arrives is not the question here. What the instruction supplies is how to run the apparatus, and the promise of arrival is Wattles’ own addition rather than a result of the instruction.

William Walker Atkinson states the same mechanism in the vocabulary of physics rather than of mind, and the choice of vocabulary is the interesting part. His title names the law he means, and the subtitle names it The Law of Attraction in the Thought World, which already concedes the New Thought point in a form a reader of the New Thought decade would accept [6]. If a thought is a vibration and vibrations meet other vibrations, then two people thinking the same thing are two physical systems meeting, and the meeting is not a metaphor. Atkinson’s contribution to this debate is not a new mechanism. It is an import from the physics of his own decade, and the import is what makes the belief look like a discovery rather than a superstition [6].

The Secret’s own decade added distribution without adding mechanism. Rhonda Byrne packaged the same instruction as a film and a book [7]. She gained mainstream popularity and commercial success after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show [7], and the instruction reached an audience far outside the churches that had kept the practice alive. Self-actualization supplied a vocabulary in which the same procedure appears as a psychology of fulfilled potential rather than as a metaphysics, which makes it easier to adopt and harder to argue with [8]. Affirmation supplied the classroom form, the practice of positive thinking in New Age terminology [9].

Magnetic field of bar magnets repelling. Photo: Alexander Wilmer Duff / Wikimedia Commons. Two bar magnets with iron filings standing in ridges in the gap between their like poles. Source

What this tradition does not contain should be stated as plainly as what it does. It contains no test that its own mechanism could fail. There is no procedure in Goddard, in Wattles, or in Atkinson by which a practitioner could discover that the impression did not take. The encyclopedia summary of the belief records the absence directly, and it records that no empirical scientific support exists for the position that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences [1]. A system that predicts everything and cannot be refuted is not thereby a system that has been tested and survived. It is a system that has not been tested.

This is why the tradition is best read as a technique rather than as a claim. The reviewers of the government programme behind the other doctrine put the point about belief in one sentence: “any discussion based on belief should be limited to questions that are not data-driven” [3]. Read as a technique, it is a prescription about the allocation of attention, and a prescription is a claim that can be put to a test: follow it and see what happens.

Doctrine B: a discipline for not knowing

The second doctrine also runs on an assumption of mind-primacy, and it is the same assumption. The mind is not a receiver in a passive sense. What the mind does is decide what enters the apparatus at all. The dispute is entirely about what that determination should be [2].

The controlling text is a training manual issued in 1985, and it reads less like a book about the mind than like a quality standard for a production process [2]. It ends with a glossary, in which Analytical Overlay is defined as information produced by the conscious or unconscious which clutters the signal; noise [2]. The definition is reproduced here without correction because its exact wording matters. Whatever the viewer thinks, feels, hopes for, or has read about the target is not weak evidence about the target. It is noise in a channel, and a channel with noise in it cannot be read by wanting more.

Everything else in the manual follows from that definition. The instruction that governs the whole session is short enough to be memorised and strange enough to be worth quoting exactly: “The best results are produced when the viewer ignores the content of the data and concentrates on the structure” [2]. The viewer is not to think about Hawaii. The viewer is to write about shapes and lines. The content is where the desire enters, and the structure is what is left when the desire has been set aside.

The manual is equally explicit about what the training is not. It states, in a single sentence, that in teaching the method no one is being taught to be psychic [2]. What is being taught is a format. A person who has the format and no ability produces a session with no signal in it, and the manual tells him what to do about that, because pretending otherwise is the actual enemy: there is no shame in missing the signal, the shame is in not calling the break and allowing an overlay to be produced [2]. The protocol converts failure from a secret into a routine entry in a log.

The rule about the interviewer is the one that makes the doctrine a doctrine about will rather than a doctrine about talent. The manual requires that the interaction between interviewer and viewer be kept to a minimum, in order to prevent inadvertent cueing or extemporaneous stimulus which might interfere with the viewer’s ability to retrieve and objectify the signal [2]. This is a rule about two people in a room. It says that one of them must not help, even unintentionally, even by asking a helpful question, and that the natural human move of trying to be useful is the specific thing that must be suppressed.

The stages make the inversion visible. The first stage is an immediate drawing made without delay, and the manual’s own gloss on that stage treats any visual image as an overlay rather than as data [2]. Later stages move through sensory contact to three-dimensional description, and at every stage the manual keeps marking the same boundary between what is received and what is supplied [2]. A reader trained this way is not being told that a target cannot be seen. A reader trained this way is being told that a target cannot be seen by the part of the reader that wants to see it.

Theodolite, tripod. Photo: Europeana. A brass theodolite standing in its open wooden case, with a second case beside it. Source

The method was never one method. Targ and Puthoff are generally credited with coining the term “remote viewing” to distinguish it from the closely related concept of clairvoyance [10]. This paper reads the literature that grew up around the programme as treating remote viewing, extrasensory perception, and the various laboratory names for the same practice as a family with different sponsors rather than as distinct phenomena. The programme moved from a research institute to a military unit and eventually to a review that ended it [11]. The case that shows how seriously the protocol was taken inside mainstream physics is that physicists Targ and Puthoff began testing psychics for SRI in 1972 [11]. The viewer’s own understanding of the practice is built from the same body of rules, and the rules are the tradition [12].

Note what the doctrine does not claim. It does not claim that the signal is weakened by thinking about it in general. It claims that the content of a session is the part most likely to be supplied by the reader, and it asks for discipline above all in that one place [2]. That is a narrower claim than the New Thought position and a more operational one, and it is the reason the two doctrines can be set beside each other without one simply cancelling the other.

The inventor diagnoses his own failure

The most useful document in this whole collection is not the manual. It is the founder’s own account of the failure that produced the method, because in that account the second doctrine discovers its own first principle rather than being taught it [13].

Light dispersion conceptual waves. Photo: Lucas Vieira / Wikimedia Commons. A diagram of white light entering a prism and leaving it split into separated colours. Source

Ingo Swann’s own account enters Janet’s daily report for 22 March 1972, and he records the breakthrough as the one that was to have tremendous importance when controlled remote viewing was later developed at Stanford Research Institute. The test in question had produced too much data rather than too little, and the report he transcribes says so directly: “It is not a problem of seeing too little, as we thought before, but SEEING TOO MUCH” [13]. The capitals are marked in the record as added emphasis. Underneath them sits a hypothesis, in the daily report Swann transcribes, that the viewer may be able to see all the waves in the atmosphere from infrared to ultraviolet [13].

The interesting part is the causal reading he gives it in the same report. If the problem is too much rather than too little, then the excess is not perception but too much of the surrounding radiation, and the explanation recorded for it is a time lag in the ionised air [13]. The remedy he records is positional rather than disciplinary: Silfen asked the subject to sit on the border between the inner and outer circle, and accuracy on that test seemed to depend on it. Swann writes down the mechanism by which the reader answers one trial late, and the field calls this displacement [13]. The reader reports what is nearest, which in that test is the previous trial.

The terminology he chooses later shows how far the argument was from credulity. Swann defines the desired content as the quintessence, that is the essential essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form, and he names the opposite the pollutant, that is something that befouls or taints, especially by contamination [14]. A writer who believes he is receiving communications from outside himself does not need a word for what spoils them. The word exists because the writer assumes the possibility of contamination as a matter of course and has to name the two things it separates.

The protocols for that session were Schmeidler’s, approved through her own peer review, and Swann was the subject, supposed to influence only the targets she selected [15]. Some of the target thermistors were placed behind glass to see whether the glass acted as a psychic shield, and all of the thermistors, target or not, were sealed inside thermos bottles [15]. The detail deserves a pause. A man who believed that thought creates reality had no reason to believe that glass blocks it, and he took part in the test anyway. The test only makes sense inside a doctrine in which an intention can fail to arrive.

The most consequential of Swann’s notes is the one in which he audits his own field during the period of the final review. He records that operational sessions had been conducted as often as possible under double-blind conditions, in order to prevent inadvertent cueing by monitor personnel [14]. He then records that at the time of the investigation, however, viewers were allowed substantial background information before their sessions [14]. The second sentence is the whole methodological dispute in miniature. A protocol that depends on removing the operator’s wishes requires, at minimum, that nobody involved is told which outcome the session is meant to produce.

This is what it looks like when a doctrine of purity is held by the people who invented it. The diagnostic vocabulary all comes from inside the practice rather than from its critics: contamination, double-blindness and overlay are the terms of the field’s own literature [14], displacement is the term for a reader who answers one trial late [13], and shielding is the term for the experiment’s exposure to other kinds of electromagnetism [15]. Nobody had to demonstrate that these were the correct terms. They had to be adopted, because the alternative was to admit that the thing being measured was the person doing the measuring [14].

The contemplative twin of emptying

The strongest version of the second doctrine’s central rule is set down in a fourteenth-century classic [16].

The instruction in The Cloud of Unknowing is stated as an action with a subject and an object. Since the cloud sits above the practitioner and between the practitioner and the divine, the text says that you must place a Cloud of Forgetting beneath you, between yourself and everything that has ever been made [16]. A cloud of forgetting is not a metaphor for uncertainty in the sense of not knowing an answer. It is placed under the practitioner deliberately, in order to interrupt the flow of particular intentions that would otherwise reach the one thing being sought. The mechanism is subtractive. You remove a category of input in order to protect the remaining one.

The rule for what to do when the removed category returns is the sharpest instruction in the whole tradition, and it is aimed exactly at the wish. If a thought presses upon you to ask what you long for, the answer allowed is a single word, and the text forbids taking that word apart [16]. The prohibition on analysis is the part that matters. Analysis is how the practitioner would recover the content that was just excluded, and the tradition therefore forbids it rather than merely discouraging it.

The tradition is candid about how hard this is. The text says that an exceedingly great labour awaits unless special grace is granted [16]. No technique is being described that can be carried out on demand by a person who wants something. The manual’s claim about ignoring content and the Cloud’s claim about forgetting both presuppose a practitioner for whom the wanting has stopped being the dominant fact.

The structural description of the tradition is apophatic. Apophatic theology, also called negative theology, approaches the divine by negation and speaks only in terms of what may not be said about it [17]. The tradition therefore has a method, and the method is subtraction performed on language rather than on attention. Two different vehicles, one operation.

Blassenstein Erlauftal mit Nebel 02 Panorama. Photo: Uoaei1 / Wikimedia Commons. A valley under a low blanket of fog, with treetops rising out of it. Source

Meister Eckhart states the conclusion of that operation in the most compressed form available in the Western tradition, and it is not a claim about acquisition at all. His sentence is that the Eye with which I see God is the same Eye with which God sees me [18]. Read as a claim about identity, it says that the instrument and the act of seeing are already one, which leaves no separate observer standing outside it. Read as a technique, it says that whatever you are trying to achieve by effort is already what you are. The contemplative tradition does not, on this reading, teach a person to reach something remote.

Krishnamurti’s contribution is to strip the technique down until the vocabulary of acquisition has nothing left in it. His practice is passive, choiceless awareness, held against contrived technique and against the act of choosing [19]. The two prohibitions are aimed at the same target as the Cloud’s prohibition on analysis. What must be given up is not the practice but the control of the practice, because control is a form of wanting.

The Indian tradition draws the same boundary with different vocabulary and much greater formal rigour. The Yoga Sutras define the discipline as the restriction of the fluctuations of mindstuff [20]. Nirodha is the term for the cessation of those fluctuations, and it is the condition from which a distinct witnessing consciousness is discerned rather than merged [20]. Samadhi names the state of meditative consciousness [21]. Kenshō, in the Chan tradition, names the seeing of one’s own nature [22]. Zazen describes a posture in which the mind is allowed to move, with no content added and none removed [23].

The separated pair in this vocabulary is the same pair the laboratory uses. Dharana is the holding of attention on a single chosen object [24], and samatha-vipassanā names the distinction between stilling the mind and the clear seeing that comes with it, the two qualities being developed in tandem [25]. Metacognition names the awareness of one’s own thinking as the practical form of that same position [26]. Attention itself is defined in psychology as the concentration of awareness directed at a task while mostly excluding others [27].

That last definition is the hinge of the whole paper, and it is a dictionary entry rather than a doctrine. If attention is the concentration of awareness directed at a task while mostly excluding others, then a doctrine about what to direct attention at is not a doctrine about reality. It is a doctrine about a setting on a piece of equipment [1]. Both traditions argue over that setting, and they set it in opposite directions. New Thought fills the attention with the desired outcome [1]. The Cloud of Unknowing instructs the practitioner to place a cloud of forgetting between himself and everything created [16]. That is a genuine disagreement about practice. It is not, by itself, a disagreement about the world.

What the laboratory says about wanting

The second tradition’s central worry is called Analytical Overlay in the manual [2]. The same idea is the title of a document by Ingo Swann: “Remote Viewing Versus Telepathic Overlay” [14]. The vocabulary of the ordinary sciences turns out to be much richer on this point than the parapsychological literature usually admits, and one of its terms is sensory leakage, information transferred by conventional, non-paranormal means during an experiment into extrasensory perception [28].

The classic case is a horse. In 1907 a psychologist demonstrated that the animal performing arithmetic in public exhibitions was not performing arithmetic, and was instead watching the reactions of its trainer [29]. The trainer did not know he was cueing. The artefact has been named after the demonstration ever since, and it continues to matter as a form of the observer-expectancy effect [29]. Every component of the remote viewing controversy is present in this case. There is a performer who appears to do something impossible. There is a supervisor whose expectation is the actual cause. There is a task at which the performer succeeds far better than chance. And the demonstration that dissolves it is not a better instrument but an observation of the human being in the room.

Chess game Staunton No. 6. Photo: Wilfredor / Wikimedia Commons. A wooden chess set on its board, the two knights carved as horse heads on the back rank. Source

The laboratory’s general term for an observer who changes what is measured by believing in the measurement is the demand characteristic, defined as the artefact in which participants form an interpretation of the experiment’s purpose and change their behaviour to fit that interpretation [30]. The paired term is response bias, a general term for the wide range of tendencies that lead participants to respond inaccurately or falsely to questions, and it is prevalent in research involving participant self-report [31]. The same mechanism seen from the scorer’s side is confirmation bias, the tendency to search for, interpret, favour and recall information so as to support prior beliefs [32], and motivated reasoning is its motivated counterpart [33].

The much-cited demonstration that this operates on ordinary people and not only on performers is a schoolroom study. Rosenthal and Jacobson advanced the idea that teachers’ expectations of their students affect the students’ performance, and the finding became known as the Pygmalion effect [34]. No teacher was lying. No teacher was instructed to treat a particular pupil differently. The teachers were simply told that certain pupils were more capable, and the bloomers gained in the first two grades, though the effect has failed to replicate and later reviews find it small and temporary [34]. The self-fulfilling prophecy is the general statement of that mechanism: a prior belief about what will happen can produce the outcome it predicted [35].

Four findings describe how small the required contamination can be. Priming has been proposed as a way an earlier exposure shifts a later response without conscious guidance, though the behavioural-priming literature is contested [36]. Subliminal stimuli can bias decisions, but the consensus of subliminal messaging remains unsubstantiated by other research, and the effect shows itself only in behaviours the person already intends to perform [37]. A perceptual set is a standing readiness to see things in one particular way, which is precisely the condition an operator acquires once the answer they want is fixed in advance [38]. And the manual forbids exactly that moment in its own words: “at no time should the viewer be sketching an image he has in his head” [2].

The standing alternative explanation in this field is named and documented, and it is not a vague suggestion. Cold reading is a set of techniques used by mentalists, psychics, fortune-tellers, and mediums, and it works without any prior knowledge of the subject [39]. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation and by making vague statements that the subject completes [39]. This is the relevant comparison for any protocol in which a viewer reports the contents of a place without being there, and the comparison is strong precisely because it needs no parapsychology at all.

The oldest explanation in parapsychology is the least exotic one. Sensory leakage is information that reached a person by conventional, non-paranormal means during an experiment into extrasensory perception [28], and the standard example is the reflection of a target card in the holder’s glasses [28]. Parapsychology exists in a field where the mundane explanation has a name, a history, and a documented mechanism, which is unusual and which has not made the problem easier [40].

The field’s own best answer to leakage is the ganzfeld experiment, in which the receiver sits in a comfortable chair with halved ping-pong balls over the eyes, having a red light shone on them, and hears white or pink noise through headphones [41]. It is a serious design and it is the reason the field’s central problem is hard rather than merely embarrassing. The receiver is in this state of mild sensory deprivation for half an hour [41], and sensory leakage is one of the flaws the same article still counts against the ganzfeld studies [41]. It therefore also removes the frame that makes a report about a place interpretable. The better the instrument becomes at excluding the world, the worse it becomes at identifying what is excluded.

What the laboratory literature supplies is not a verdict on the second doctrine. It supplies the reason the second doctrine’s own rules were written. The manual’s prohibition on cueing, its insistence on the break, its refusal to interpret the content, and its inventory of overlay are, read against the ordinary literature, instances of demand characteristics, response bias, confirmation bias, and cold reading, anticipated and answered by the people who had the most to lose from being wrong [2].

The verdict of 1995 and the split inside it

The programme ended in a review published in 1995, and the report is the most instructive document in the collection because it is careful in a way that neither party of this paper’s central quarrel is careful [3].

The report begins with agreement. Its first finding states that a statistically significant effect has been observed in the recent laboratory experiments of remote viewing [3]. That sentence is not hedged and does not depend on which reviewer wrote it. In the studies the reviewers examined, hits occurred more often than chance, and both reviewers accepted that as a fact about the data.

Bud Uanna A Declassified Document Cover Sheer with Passport p.1. Photo: U.S. Department of State Security Files and Passport Office Frances G. Knight. / Wikimedia Commons. A stamped declassified security form with an open passport beneath it and a pen alongside. Source

Agreement stops there. The same document states that the existence of a statistically significant effect did not lead both reviewers to the conclusion that this research programme had provided an unequivocal demonstration that remote viewing exists [3]. The finding that survives is about the data. The finding that fails is about what the data means. A second formulation puts the gap more plainly: even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon has been demonstrated [3].

The two reviewers then diverged completely while accepting the same numbers. One concluded, using the standards applied to any other area of science, that psychic functioning had been well established [3]. The other held that the existence of a statistically significant effect did not lead to an unequivocal demonstration that remote viewing exists [3]. Neither reviewer is accused of fraud or of error in the other. They disagree about how much a departure from chance is worth when the ways of producing that departure have not been excluded.

The reason the disagreement could not be closed is structural rather than personal, and the structure is the same one that appears in every difficult case in this paper. Parapsychology, read this way, does not measure a target directly. What the field measures is a rate of correct reports, and a typical measure of psi phenomena is a statistical deviation from chance expectation [40]. That design has no analogue that could settle it by improving the equipment, because a better instrument narrows the error bars around a number whose interpretation is what is in dispute. Precognition in particular is a claim that the effect runs backwards in time, which no instrument can settle [42]. The objection is the one this paper has already met from the other side: the better the record, the more exactly it reports what the reader was told to expect.

It is worth being exact about what the report does not say. It does not say the effect is absent, and it does not say the data were fabricated; on the contrary, the report answers claims of flaws or fraud [3]. It says that the available design could not distinguish a phenomenon from the ways that a protocol can produce the appearance of a phenomenon, and that the ways are known, named, and demonstrated in the ordinary literature cited in the previous section. The observer effect, in the sense the source defines it, is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation, a definition the article gives for physics and not for a room full of people [43]. The second tradition never solved it. It mitigated it, repeatedly, with the manual’s rules about structure and breaks [2] and with the double-blind conditions the same report records for the programme’s operational sessions [14], and those rules are the reason the question was still worth asking when the review arrived.

Connecting the Dots

The two doctrines agree on more than this paper’s framing has so far allowed. Both assume that the mind is causally primary. Both assume that the mind’s activity has consequences outside the person. Both hand the practitioner a procedure rather than a sentiment, and both procedures concern the allocation of attention. Attention itself is the concentration of awareness directed at a task while mostly excluding others [27], and the manual’s version is the same concentration pointed at structure rather than content [2]. The disagreement is not about whether attention is a cause. The disagreement is about the sign of its effect.

That is why the collision is total in one place and only nominal everywhere else. In practice, the two doctrines issue instructions that cannot be executed in the same act. One says to hold one image with positive certainty until it is felt and expressed [5]. The other says to ignore the content of the data and concentrate on the structure [2]. Both cannot be obeyed, because one is an instruction to add content and the other is an instruction to remove it. A practitioner who is holding a picture of the desired outcome is doing, in the manual’s vocabulary, exactly what the manual defines as noise.

The connective tissue between the two is the analytic overlay. It is the New Thought practitioner’s own conviction showing up in a channel where it cannot be distinguished from the arrival. The Pygmalion demonstration is the same fact in a schoolroom: teachers’ expectations affect students’ performance, though the effect is contested and has repeatedly failed to replicate [34]. The inventory of ways this happens is long, cheap, and well documented. Priming has been proposed as a way an earlier exposure shifts a later response without conscious guidance, though the behavioural-priming literature is contested [36].

Railway tracks and points at Clapham Junction - geograph.org.uk - 2552768. Photo: Bill Boaden / Wikimedia Commons. Many railway tracks converging and crossing through a junction, with points between the rails. Source

The second connective tissue is subtraction. The Cloud of Forgetting is placed under the practitioner to interrupt the flow of particular intentions [16]. The double-blind session is the laboratory’s version of the same operation, arranged so that the monitor cannot cue by accident [14]. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras give Nirodha as the cessation of the changing states of the mind, citta-vrtti [44]. Three traditions, from three different centuries, arriving at the same conclusion: the input you most want to keep is the input you must remove.

The conclusion that follows is narrow, and it is the one this paper will defend. As a procedure, the first doctrine’s instruction is a real instrument with a documented effect on the person who follows it, and that effect is measurable without any claim about reality [1]. As a procedure, the second doctrine’s instruction is a real instrument for improving the reliability of a report, and the manual says as much in its own terms for the nonblind training sessions that make up most of its sessions, where session results do not stand alone as proof [2]. Neither of these is in dispute. What is in dispute is the metaphysical claim each procedure is normally used to underwrite, and those two claims are not of the same kind and cannot both be evaluated by the same evidence.

The Other Side

The strongest case against this paper’s reading is that it lets both sides off too easily. On that account, the first doctrine is not an unfalsifiable optimism but a practical psychology: adherents who take the manifestation and law of attraction beliefs seriously often report higher perceived levels of success, and positivity can improve quality of life and resilience through hardship even when it misleads [1]. The New Thought writers, on this reading, were reaching for real regularities with the wrong nouns.

That case has force. A person who holds one object in mind continuously, ignores contrary input, and acts as if the state were accomplished is running a self-fulfilling prophecy deliberately, and a self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that comes true at least in part because the person believes it will [35]. A person who is told that a positive expectancy changes performance and who then behaves accordingly often finds a small and short-lived improvement, though the classic result has repeatedly failed to replicate [34]. And the placebo literature records that “placebos can affect some outcomes such as pain and nausea”, while expectations can influence results [45]. On this reading the sewing machine instruction is not a failed law of attraction. It is an unusually efficient description of an expectancy effect with a behavioural component.

Japanese room with tatami mats. Photo: No machine-readable author provided. Fg2 assumed (based on copyright claims). / Wikimedia Commons. An empty room with tatami mats, plain white walls and frosted sliding screens. Source

The first doctrine also wins the argument about which technique is more useful in ordinary life. Almost everyone who wants something can hold it in mind. Almost nobody can empty the mind of wanting on demand, and the contemplative tradition admits this when it says that an exceedingly great labour awaits without special grace [16]. A technique that can be executed on demand, even if it does not deliver the object, will still move the practitioner, and movement is what the doctrine promised.

The strongest case in the opposite direction is that this reading is too generous to the second doctrine. Its whole apparatus was an attempt to measure something, and the measurement failed in a way that its own rules could not repair. If the effect is contamination, then the contemplative literature has been misdescribed as a research programme. Nirodha would be a state of mind and not an instrument [44]. Kenshō would name a seeing and not a finding [22]. And the Cloud of Unknowing, which makes a specific promise about where attention should be directed [16], would be a devotional text that happens to contain a procedure borrowed from a laboratory.

That case also has force. The 1995 review found a statistically significant effect and still could not say what it was an effect of [3]. A discipline that cannot state its own stopping condition cannot distinguish a discipline from a practice of producing agreeable impressions. And the fact that the record notes seeing too much rather than seeing too little, and names as displacement the case where the reader misses the comparison by one trial, is not evidence of rigour. It is evidence of a difficulty that rigour did not solve [13].

Each of these two cases defeats the corresponding half of this paper’s conclusion, and the paper’s conclusion survives only because it never claimed otherwise. The first doctrine’s effectiveness as a psychology of expectancy does not establish its cosmology. The second doctrine’s failure as a measurement does not make its contemplative relatives into nothing. What the two cases together show is that the metaphysical question and the practical question came apart a long time ago. The remote viewing programme ran for practical purposes from the early 1970s until the spring of 1995 [3], and this paper argues that each doctrine ended up wearing the other’s clothing.

What We Actually Know

Established, and not in dispute: the New Thought position was carried as a practice and not only as a promise, and its own encyclopaedia summary records that no empirical scientific support exists for the claim that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experience [1]. The manual at the centre of the second doctrine defines analytical overlay as information produced by the conscious or unconscious which clutters the signal, and it names that information as noise [2]. The same manual states that the best results come when the viewer ignores the content of the data and concentrates on the structure [2], that no one is being taught to be psychic, and that the shame lies in not calling the break and allowing an overlay to be produced [2]. It requires the interaction between interviewer and viewer to be kept to a minimum so as to prevent inadvertent cueing [2]. The record notes that the original problem was seeing too much rather than seeing too little, and names as displacement the case where the reader misses the comparison by one trial and sees the last trial instead [13]. It records that operational sessions were conducted as often as possible under double-blind conditions to prevent inadvertent cuing, and that viewers were allowed substantial background information at the time of the AIR investigation [14]. The 1995 review found that a statistically significant effect had been observed in the recent laboratory experiments of remote viewing [3].

2009 3962573662 card catalog. Photo: Stuart Caie from Edinburgh, Scotland / Wikimedia Commons. A long wall of wooden card catalogue drawers with brass handles and label holders. Source

The ordinary science that bears on both is already settled, and this paper needs only its terms. The Clever Hans demonstration showed a performer responding to a supervisor’s involuntary cues [29]. Demand characteristics are the artefact in which participants change their behaviour to fit their reading of the experiment’s purpose [30]. Cold reading produces apparently specific information from no prior knowledge [39]. Sensory leakage is information transferred by conventional means during an experiment into extrasensory perception [28]. Teachers’ expectations affect students’ performance, though the effect is contested and has repeatedly failed to replicate [34]. Attention is the concentration of awareness directed at a task while mostly excluding others [27]. The yoga discipline is defined as the restriction of the fluctuations of mindstuff [20]. The Cloud of Unknowing instructs the practitioner to place a cloud of forgetting between himself and everything created [16]. It is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the second half of the fourteenth century [46].

Not established, and not claimed here: that an act of will brings about the object willed. The belief’s own summary records the absence of empirical support [1]. Not established: that a statistically significant effect in the remote viewing programme demonstrates the phenomenon, since the review itself records that the significance did not lead both reviewers to an unequivocal demonstration [3]. Not established: that a disciplined emptying of wanting produces accurate knowledge of anything outside the practitioner. Not established either: that a practitioner’s expectation cannot alter what is recorded, which the contested Pygmalion effect reports and which has repeatedly failed to replicate [34] and the demand characteristic explains [30]. And not claimed here: that the contemplative traditions require the laboratory result to stand. Apophatic theology predates it by centuries and argues its own case [17], and what Krishnamurti asks to be given up is the content of consciousness, its images and its attachments [19].

So the answer to the question this paper was asked is yes, with one seam. The two doctrines can both be true provided they are true on different planes, and the plane on which they collide is the only one on which they cannot. Held as claims about reality, they contradict each other: if wanting creates the outcome, an accurate reading cannot require the absence of wanting. Held as claims about how a practitioner must use attention, they are complementary, and the shared insight is the one both founders would have accepted, which is that the operator is never outside the apparatus. The New Thought writer puts that operator at the centre of causation [1]. The remote viewing manual puts the same operator at the centre of the error term [2]. Neither of them can be right about both, and each of them knows it.

References

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