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Just thinking about ESP confuses many people. But in all actuality, it isnt that hard to understand if you break it down. There are basically three different types of ESP: ability to read the future, see the past, and the ability to communicate mind to mind with no speech (Arvey 10). Of these forms precognition is the ability to see what is in the future (Grunwald 16). This is the form of ESO that most fortunetellers claim to have.
There have been numerous accounts of seeing the future. For example, right before John F. Kennedy died, he told his wife that he had a funny feeling that he would die in office. Than he also told his wife that while he was in a convertible car it would be easy for anyone to shoot him from a window, so they might as well not even worry about it, because there would be no way to stop it (Arvey 15).
In this view the future is thought to be nothing more than just a number of different possibilities that could happen after the present time which can be varied by choices made between the present time and the future. With all of the different possibilities that could happen in the future, it is possible that guessing the correct future has been wrongfully credited with reading the future. With no proof that anyone is able to actually read the future consistently many people still remain skeptical of believing that it is possible to look into the future. retro cognition in which you have great knowledge of past events with which you had no encounter through you five senses (Arvey 11). These encounters with ESP often relate to events that have happened before the person who experiences the lapse of ESP was ever born. Retrocognition is much more convincing than precognition because if it is just a guess, the odds of guessing correctly are far less.
If it did not happen while you existed, then you do not know names, dates or events. Gypsies are often thought to have the power of retro cognition by looking into their crystal ball and seeing what has happened to you in the past. Just like other forms of ESP, this cannot be proven past anything more than a lucky guess. Telepathy is the ability to communicate with someone else without speech or any other symbols, just mind to mind transfer of information (Cohen 27). Some people think that the brain can work as a radio. This is what Upton Sinclair state in his book Mental Radio published in 1930.
He claimed that he could send pictures to his wife, mentally and that she could re-draw them onto paper. Upton Sinclair's theory confirmed that the mental radio had a certain range in which it could reach and at a certain distance the signals would fizzle out (Arvey 32 - 33). However, there have been an equal number of encounters with ESP that have taken place across seas, as there have been which are only a few feet away. Telepathic powers can be prove no more than retro cognition and precognition, thus it can be called nothing more than pure coincidence when minds meet. There have been all sorts of encounters with ESP, some are used to stop bad from happening, some are too late to stop the bad, and some have no meaning besides letting you know what is going to happen. There have been so many accounts of people claiming to have ESP, that it makes a person wonder if there really is more to ESP than what science can explain.
Nevertheless people still brush ESP off as luck and coincidence. One day a couple in Pennsylvania were both leaving in the morning to go to work. The husband, Dan, worked at a paper mill and ran the machine that cut the paper. His wife Laura had missed the alarm, and overslept, so she was scrambling to make up for lost time. Usually Dan left at the same time as Laura and they would follow each other through town out to the highway where they would blow each other a kiss every day when they would head off in different directions. However, today Dan just yelled good bye to Laura while she was in the shower, assuming she heard him, but his farewell went unheard.
When she got out of the shower, she called for Dan, no one replied. So she went out to the garage and saw that his pick-up truck was gone. Right then and there she got a terrible feeling in her stomach, she knew that Dan was in danger. She had never been one to claim she had psychic powers, or even to be over superstitious, but she knew that something was terribly wrong, there was no doubt in her mind. She called in sick to work and threw on a pair of sweat pants without combing her hair or applying her deodorant.
Into her car she hopped and took off down the road, she knew that time was of the essence so she paid no attention to speed limits. Weaving in and out of city traffic until she reached the highway, she opened it up going over 85 mph, starting to get dizzy from her overwhelming fear. Once she arrived at Rainbow Mills she took off down every hallway to get to her husbands area of work. She had never been to his work before, because he was nothing more than a common mill worker, so she never had any reason to go there before.
But this day she knew exactly where to go without questioning she got to the big room where the machine he ran was located, but the doors were locked. She knocked frantically, after what seemed like a lifetime, someone opened the door for her. She saw Dan across the shop and yelling Dan not knowing why she was yelling for him, just knowing he was in danger. Dan looked at Laura as if she were crazy, he wondered what in the world she was doing there, so he started to walk towards her, planning on scolding her for interrupting him while he was at work. After he took about 10 steps toward her, his machine short fused and blew up. Dan would have been killed if he would have been right along side of the machine.
He still ended up with third and second degree burns covering over 40 % of his body, and suffered a few broken ribs due to pieces of the machine that were shot off in the blast (Jackson 2). It cannot be explained as to how Laura knew that something terrible was about to happen to Dan. It could be shrugged off as nothing besides just a pure coincidence that she had these feelings at this exact time. But the odds are far too unlikely, you have to take into account all of the different variables that happened that day, from the alarm clock not waking Laura up, to Dan not saying good bye, and the guy feeling that Laura had. How many times doe a person have a guy feeling like that? And what are the odds that it would be so precise?
All of these questions will probably remain a mystery forever as modern science is unable to explain any sense beyond the normal: sight, hearing, feeling, taste and smell. Many times people see ads on TV for psychic hotlines and wonder just how accountable these can be. No one can really say whether another person has psychic abilities or not. There is always the chance that a psychic could be correct through guessing, but it cant be proven that they actually see the future, or the past. All-in-all the only fact that has been proven about ESP, is that ESP cant be proven, or disproved.
Most people have had their own encounters with ESP, mostly in the mode of dj vu, this is when something happens to you, and directly after that, you have the feeling that this has happened to you before, or that you knew it was going to happen to you. Just because this happens to you, does not necessarily mean that you are gifted with psychic powers. Dj vu occurs very often to people and actually ahs nothing to do with seeing the future, but rather the way your brain receives information on what just happened, and then it digs deep into your memory and finds something that relates very closely to the event that just happened, and seeing as how you have no clear recognition of the past memory, you subconsciously assume that it was the same event. There are many ways to test yourself for ESP, one of the ways is to turn over a number of playing cards facing down and than guess what is on the other side of the card with no visual aid of any sort.
Then write down on a piece of paper, what cards you think / know are on the other side of the card (Grunwald 51 - 52). More than half correctly guessed can be thought to be ESP. Another way to test your telepathic powers, is to try to find a person who you are very close to. And than stand a distance away from them and think one thought very strongly and see if they can pick up your thoughts just through mind waves (Arvey 32).
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Research essay sample on Ability To Communicate Upton Sinclair
