personal

Or “I’ve experiments to run. There is research to be done.”

I like experimenting with the occult; experimenting for results, and experimenting for knowledge’s sake. Sometimes the experiments are purely using human technology, using people to sense the results, sometimes the experiments use a physical device, can this candle, pinwheel, or even EEG pick anything up. There is a friend of mine who is a lot like me, in many ways a clone at times, but sadly I only see him once a year at Gather, which was last weekend, and he had a new toy.

Enter my friend who brought with him a galvanic skin response monitor, a true random number generator, and a desire to do science. We started off with various different experiments, using the galvanic skin response monitor (GSRM for short) we would watch how the body reacted to different experiences. It was experimenting for experimentation’s sake initially, we weren’t being rigorous, and we were learning the tweaks of the device and eliminating variables that we could as we figured them out.

It was neat using the GSRM and watching how the body responded in different meditations and energetic interactions including having psychic vampires feed from the test subject (me). Of course it can’t really be separated or said that the results show something energetic/magickal is happening, only that the mental actions required were causing the body to respond in different ways, though the feeding was blind, so my mental actions shouldn’t have matched up to what I didn’t know was going on.

The most fascinating experiments came from the true random number generator (TRNG), if you’re unfamiliar with the device this one uses something about a semi-conductor and a whitenoise and stuff I don’t grok yet to produce thousands of numbers a second, either a 1 or a 0. When the chances are 50/50 statistically in any given second the TRNG would produce roughly as many 0s as 1s. Of course, just by chance anomalies will occur, using the threshold of 0.05 (I believe), which is a standard for statistic results and once every 20 seconds such an anomaly would occur by chance, the value used (whatever it was) is used a lot in paranormal/psychic research because it’s a bit more strict so plays into the extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence idea. If you’ve not followed any of the paranormal research around the TRNG they seem to be triggered in odd ways, by odd things. My friend was describing it as a spiritual accelerometer, it’s not that it will continually beep when weird shit is happening, but if weird shit happens fast it seems to go off. The human body doesn’t have a mechanism that lets us experience speed, we think we do, but what we’re feeling is things like the air moving against us, or the vibration of the vehicles we’re in. Humans don’t feel speed, but we experience acceleration, so in a perfect vehicle that produced no vibrations we couldn’t feel going 60 km/h, but if we went from 0 to 60 km/h in 5 seconds we would, yet if we went from 0 to 60 km/h in 5 minutes we might not be able to feel it because the sensation of acceleration is too slow. We have no idea why, paranormal researchers who do cool things with TRNGs have no idea why, but it seems the respond in the same way on some energetic level. It doesn’t register that woogity is happening, that 60 km/h, but it registers the quick acceleration to it.

I repeatedly created “sacred space” around the TRNG in several different methods, and as if to prove the point the method that “snaps” sacred space into place in a second at the end of the work would set the device off, but the one that took about three minutes showed no statistical abnormalities.

Now for what we were doing, which was more proof of concept, our results showed enough to think there is something at play, though we don’t know what, how, or why. Three out of four times when I would make the space in the fast way, each step was noted by the machine: going up to the space, pulling the space down, and releasing it. Three statistically significant results the second I said the step was happening, three out of four times. The game was afoot. Apparently this is par for the course with my friend, enough statistically unusual results exactly at the right moment, not 100% but with enough consistencies to show something seems to be happening.

We got the idea to test moving the TRNG in and out of sacred space. Having to create space quickly enough to register limited the type, “depth,” and range of sacred space, but if we spent a lot of time making the space as best we could, perhaps moving the device over the boundary would show up. To stack the experiment in our favour (as we were just looking for proof this would register) I asked my friend Michelle to help me make the space as Michelle is phenomenally talented and we work well together.

We stood aside from the group, joined hands, synced energy, and then reached out creating sacred space in a manner we’re both familiar with. Resonating, reverberating, Forcing the world out with our Will we made the space as best we could. Once it was established I drew back one edge using a line on the carpet pattern as the boundary of the space, both for a physical/visual reference, and for the sake of an objective line. So rather than saying it was “roughly 45 centimeters to my left” it was that line on the carpet, right there, with that star. A hard and fast border.

I pulled my mind back as best I could (the syncing makes it odd) and told my friend, and another friend who was watching from several feet away to walk toward us, until the device was between Michelle and me, and then walk back and see what they could find. I kept my eyes closed to make sure I couldn’t influence the experiment in that way somehow, and to help keep the space strong.

After a minute or two I realize I can hear my friends giggling under their breaths, and a minute or so after they tell us they’re done, they have enough data. We closed the space and came back to our selves. They tell us that the device was going off repeatedly, every time they got close they would get a result, and while it was still not at 100% it was more consistent than my friend had ever seen, and with such perfect regularity that after a while they couldn’t stop themselves from giggling at the astounding results.

While I was impressed, that was that, until one showed that it was happening with such consistency that over such a precise spot that they were able to discover the edge of the space by how consistent the results were, and they pointed down exactly at the line of carpet that was where I anchored the space. To the centimeter the TRNG was able to find the boundary of the sacred space.

I find this utterly fascinating and exciting (my apologies to those who follow Michelle and me on twitter as we apparently were tweeting a lot about it), again no ideas about the mechanisms, the how, or why, no claim that this was a rigorous lab experiment proving this beyond a shadow of a doubt. None the less, the results were nothing less than amazing to us, and warrant more research and experimenting, and we have no shortage of experiments that we want to run…once I buy my own devices by the end of the summer.