After meditating this morning I sat down to do telekinesis practice. That’s not the interesting part.
The interesting part is that I felt like it worked, and yet nothing happened. I’ve stared at this thing for a collective 50+ hrs of my life at this point. I’m no stranger to the countless baffling conditions under which it does or does not move.
But this one threw me for a loop.
I was certain I’d done everything correctly. The foil had fallen off the needle so I put it back on. Told it, without words, to stop spinning (so I wouldn’t have to wait). It did stop spinning. Then I got started. It’s not actually all that complicated a process. It’s mostly a feeling thing. And today it all felt right. And yet, it did not spin.
How is this possible?
I give it a few more minutes and still nothing happened. Bizarre. Nothing. I try to stifle the frustration, which is to telekinesis as water is to fire. I think perhaps I’m doing it wrong after all. I run through all the tricks I know, even though I shouldn’t need them. It’s right. What the hell am I doing wrong? Intention — because that’s all this is — is an ineffable phenomena on the best of days. I cannot claim to fully understand it, and these writings are documentation of that pursuit, rather than a claim to mastery.
But hot damn I thought I understood it enough to do this much. I’ve spun this thing a hundred times. More. I don’t always know when or how it will move, but I know this is how it feels when it works. I’m doing it right. I grow too frustrated to do anything productive. Again, because I know. I get up and leave the walk-in closet I practice in and as soon as I do, I feel a pang in my chest. A sharp, pulling pain. The kind you might feel if you saw a toddler, just learning to walk, stumble face first into the coffee table. A thought enters my mind:
“I worry that you’ve taken the wrong lesson from this.”
I’m still brooding, but I listen anyway. I’m busy alternating between telling myself it doesn’t matter and wondering what the hell I did wrong.
“If you were to go back now and try again, it would work immediately.”
“Okay.” I saw inwardly.
I get a drink then go back to the closet. I make sure the door, my movements aren’t moving any air. I give a good thirty seconds. Then I look at the little foil tent.
Spin.
It does. Immediately.
Huh.
A verbal thought enters my mind.
“It is because you told it to ‘stop spinning’. That’s all.”
Obstruction
The trouble, of course, is that I had two intentions not one. They mutually conflicted and nothing happened, like two waves canceling each other out.
This entire scene is a rich lesson in the very real effects of intention.
One of the reasons I love TK (telekinesis) is the immediate, physical nature of the feedback. It gets past some barrier in our minds in a way that willing yourself to be happy, or hoping for a winning scratch-off ticket doesn’t. It cannot be easily reduced by mere psychology and statistics. It’s a pure measure of how intention creates change, or doesn’t.
Of course, at some point it becomes a crutch if you continue to need your experiences to be physical to be real.
- I set an intention to stop moving
- I set another to spin
- ???
- It doesn’t spin
- I break context by walking away
- I set the intention to spin
- ???
- It spins
We don’t have to understand the black boxes at #3 and #7 to see the shape of how intention works:
- #2 doesn’t override #1. Why? Hell if I know! Maybe it was weaker? That’s a whole puzzle in itself.
- Breaking context (#5) seems to completely reset the system, at least enough to get the results (#8).
- Or perhaps #2 and #1 were both still in play, but now I’d juiced the second intention enough to overcome the friction, as it were.
- I’d wager it was a reset though, only because it felt like one. That implies that intentions have a set of inherent contextual properties, such as how long they’re in effect — even though I never consciously specified
- I felt like it worked at step #4, but nothing visibly happened. In retrospect that’s because it was working. There were simply two opposing forces
That means all intentions interact with each other. There’s an entire invisible work of energetic forces pushing and pulling on each other. Swirling, canceling, building, or obstructing.
What I wanted was movement. What I got was obstruction — quietly, invisibly self-created. If I hadn’t been working with a physical object I might never have realized I was subtly creaing my own invisible trip wires.