Amhuxh.372
net.misc
utzoo!decvax!harpo!zeppo!wheps!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxa!mhuxh!lute
Fri Apr  9 11:46:17 1982
PSIONICS in Modern Society
I had an interesting discussion with a friend the other day concerning
something that I had read in an old issue of New York magazine.

What would happen if someday we could find ways to promote psionic (psi)
functioning of various kinds, in certain humans?  What would happen say with
individuals who were telepaths, say, and could read the thoughts of the
person(s) in their immediate vicinity (if not read their thoughts verbatim,
at least receive visceral responses indicating the mood of the person
perceived).  Would it lead to more honest communications between lovers,
spouses, friends, executives and politicians?  Or would it increase our
society's current trend toward inwardness?  Being an optimist, I said it
would, in the long run, lead to greater honesty among psi-types and non-psi-
types.  My friend disagreed, saying that it would lead to greater paranoia
among people and even greater interpersonal isolation.

We also discussed the use of telepathy for espionage.  This is kind of
scary because if say you had someone who was a good sender (agent), and
another who was a good receiver (percipient), and the perceiver also was
trained in art, you could have teams that could copy designs and plans of
all sorts of things.  Getting them designs out of the country would be no
problem since the percipient could be miles away in friendly territory
copying down the images sent to him by the agent.  There would be no barriers
to worry about since anecdotal evidence and successful studies have indicated
that it appears that paranormal functioning is not affected by normal
physical or energy-type barriers.  Also, if you could catch one of these
people, what do you do with them?  The magazine article suggested that in
such an instance your only recourse would be to brain damage or kill the
psionic individual, which is a chilling prospect, but logical, although
they probably could be kept in a chemically-induced stupor to prevent their
using any psi abilities.

There are a number of other interesting topics not so gloomy as this however.
One was if we could promote the voluntary use and control of psycho-kinetic
abilities, couldn't we enter new areas of microsurgical techniques and
genetic engineering that could never be attempted before.  The logic being
that physical tools can only be made so small before they would break or
be useless.  But a maniplipuable energy form such as psychokinesis (PK)
would have no such limitations and therefore would not be stymied when
working at the molecular level, for example.  I think this is an
intriguing possibility.

Does anyone else have any thoughts, insights, fears, etc. about any of
this that they would like to exchange?  I hope that there are other
people out there with som opinions on psionics, both pro and con that
would add to this discussion.


					--Jim

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