Lifting Dinner’s Veil
In the past year I’ve been trying to reduce the friction between my diet and my ethics. Among other things, this has meant becoming a vegetarian. I knew about the horrors of meat production when I was younger but I felt helpless to do anything about it, so I let the idea of forgoing meat gather cobwebs on the “things I’ll allow myself to think about someday” shelf. Finally I’ve been inspired to dust it off, and the change has relieved almost as much intellectual and emotional tension as did the sloughing of my old New Age belief set. Denial is a fascinating thing to observe in yourself once you’ve become aware of it.
I’ve noticed since I made the change that there’s a great deal of overlap between the vegetarian/vegan communities and the New Age community...
On Other Ways of Knowing, part 2
Continuing on the subject of my doubts about the presence of ESP in human beings, I’ve come up with three basic categories that the various psychic senses fall under. Each one needs to be validated a little differently — if it can be validated at all — so I wanted to address them one by one.
ESP of the Commonly Accessible
Most claims of ESP seem to be of this sort. The psychic has access to additional information about something in the physical world that an average person doesn’t. Abilities that fall into this category include aura reading, precognition, psychometry, dowsing, and remote viewing...
Testing Aura Reading
Many psychics claim to be able to gain information about your health and your emotional state by clairvoyantly examining your aura, a subtle energy field radiating from your body.
The first step in testing this claim is to confirm that the psychic is seeing something at all. We can worry about whether or not his diagnosis is accurate later on.
One might be tempted to do this by gathering a group of psychics and comparing what they describe; if they all independently see a sky blue aura around you, then perhaps we have a real phenomenon on our hands. However this approach isn’t as dependable as we’d like. In observing your face and demeanor they’re each gathering information about you, consciously or subconsciously...