fantasy

an illusion

a hallucination

fantastic designs

to imagine; visualize

imagination unrestricted by reality

an unrealistic or improbable supposition

the creative imagination; unrestrained fancy

the ability to deal aesthetically with unusual problems

to have a fancy for; to be pleased with; to like; to fancy

something, such as an invention, that is a creation of the fancy

governed by laws of association which are remote, and arbitrary or capricious

a coin issued especially by a questionable authority and not intended for use as currency

applied principally to elaborate or extravagant product of the imagination given free rein

mental invention, characteristically well removed from reality, that is whimsical, capricious, playful and elaborate or extravagant

an imagined event or sequence of mental images, such as a daydream, usually fulfilling a wish or psychological need

actuating emotional feelings of a lively, gay, and versatile character; it seeks to please by unexpected combinations of thoughts, startling contrasts, flashes of brilliant imagery

cold reading

A talented and charismatic cold reader will bully a subject into admitting a connection, demanding over and over that they acknowledge a particular statement as having some relevance and maintaining that they just aren't thinking hard enough, or are repressing an important memory.

Forer effect/Barnum statements

Cold readers use the Forer effect/Barnum statements which seem personal, yet apply to many people. Such statements are often open-ended or give the reader the maximum amount of "wriggle room" in a reading. They are designed to elicit identifying responses. The Forer effect/Barnum statements can then be developed into longer and more sophisticated paragraphs and seem to reveal great amounts of detail about a person. The success of the Forer effect relies heavily on the eagerness of people to fill in details and make connections between what is said and some aspect of their own lives.

Statement of this type might include:

"I sense that you are sometimes insecure, especially with people you don't know very well."

"You have a box of old unsorted photographs in your house."

"You had an accident when you were a child involving water."

"You're having problems with a friend or relative."

"Your father passed on due to problems in his chest or abdomen."

If the subject is old enough, his or her father is quite likely to be dead, and this statement would easily apply to a number of conditions such as heart disease, pneumonia, diabetes, most forms of cancer, and in fact to a great majority of causes of death.

shotgunning

"Shotgunning" is a commonly-used cold reading technique, used by purported television "psychics" and "spiritual mediums": Edgar Cayce, Sylvia Browne, James Van Praagh, Colin Fry and John Edward in particular have all used shotgunning techniques in their stage and television shows.

The "psychic", cold reader, quickly offers a huge quantity of very general information, often to an entire audience (some of which is very likely to be correct, near correct or at the very least, provocative or evocative to someone present), observes their subjects' reactions (especially their body language), and then narrows the scope, acknowledging particular people or concepts and refining the original statements according to those reactions to promote an emotional response.

This technique is named after a shotgun, as it fires a spray of small projectiles in the hope that one or more of the shots will strike the target. A majority of people in a room will, at some point for example, have lost an older relative or known at least one person with a common name like "Mike" or "John".

Shotgunning might include a series of vague statements such as:

"I see a heart problem with a father-figure in your family, a father, a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin... I'm definitively seeing chest pain here for a father-figure in your family."

"I see a woman that isn't a blood relative. Someone around when you were growing up, an aunt, a friend of your mother, a step-mother with blackness in the chest, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer..."

"I sense an older male figure in your life, who wants you to know whilst you may have had disagreements in your life, he still loved you."

rainbow ruse

The rainbow ruse is a crafted statements which simultaneously awards the subject with a specific personality trait, as well as the opposite of that trait. With such a phrase, a cold reader can "cover all possibilities" and appear to have made an accurate deduction in the mind of the victim, despite the fact that a rainbow ruse statement is vague and contradictory. This technique is used since personality traits are not quantifiable, and also because nearly everybody has experienced both sides of a particular emotion at some time in their lives.

Statements of this type might include:

"Most of the time you are positive and cheerful, but there has been a time in the past where you were very upset."

"You are a very kind and considerate person, but when somebody does something to break your trust, you feel deep-seated anger."

"I would say that you are mostly shy and quiet, but when the mood strikes you, you can easily become the center of attention."

A cold reader can choose from a variety of personality traits, think of its opposite, and then bind the two together in a phrase, vaguely linked by factors such as mood, time, or potential.

People who are naturally good at personal observations can unwittingly conduct readings demonstrably based on cold reading without a deliberate attempt at deception.

Cold reading, in this context, could also simply be "knowledge of reality." Consider the case of a taxi driver in Las Vegas, where innumerable professional conventions have provided him with the opportunity to gauge the characteristic group style and demeanor of entire occupations. Knowing the six big conventions on at the moment, as a party of five enters his cab, he can tell followers of "The Call" from the scuba divers, the phytopathologists from the pilots, the doctors from the police detectives, without recourse to anything but his personal experience.

After a person has done hundreds of cold readings their skills may improve to the point where they may start to believe they can actually read minds. When someone questions their own natural talent, a good psychological understanding of human nature learned through careful observation coupled with good natural intuition based upon prior experience, and begins to believe that they actually have "special psychic abilities" then they fall into the trap of "transcendental temptation".

"Transcendental temptation" in this context is defined as the belief that one has supernatural power - power above and beyond those of ordinary men - special favors bestowed by a supernatural being or god. Those that deceive themselves with the "transcendental temptation" believe they have become "little gods."

When any religious teacher comes to believe that he or she is blessed by the supernatural above his or her followers then that religious teacher has fallen into the spiritual corruption of the sin of pride.

Magic historian and occult investigator Milbourne Christopher warned that this form of "transcendental temptation" may lead one unknowingly and unwittingly into belief in the occult and a deterioration of reason.

A human that believes a fantasy is not just a imaginative concept of the mind but believes such fantasy to be truth in reality is said to have been deceived, to have been bewitched or to have been enchanted.

In reality the only magic that can truly be performed is the magic men use to fool others into believing whatever specious concept they have recently put forward with the intent to delude or deceive.

"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fantastic. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets. When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. Reality is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure. " - Henry David Thoreau

war on reality

"The concept of waiting for the big score is as ingrained in most of us as the concept of hope itself. We in California should understand that more than anyone. We are Pipedream Central." - Meghan Daum

Do you live in reality or do you live in a fantasy?

Just exactly what do you believe?

In America today it is hard to know what to accept as fact
and what to have reason to believe is a partial truth or an outright lie.

Politicians ‘spin' the truth to create favorable public opinions for their pet projects
and to obtain government decrees to enrich their friends and buddies.

Religious leaders neglect to mention the doubts that they themselves hold as they spout their brand of dogma while practicing their favorite sins.

Popular American culture suggests that we worship ourselves but to do so we must dive head first into the cult of materialistic consumerism, ‘the one with the most toys wins!'

All these paths are mired in spiritual corruption because fantasy replaces reality.

This is reality: humans are smart mammals with a sense of empathy and compassion;
an understanding of that which is evil or harmful to life and that which is good and beneficial;
and a realization of a future existence.

The Earth's environment is a closed system which supports all the life on Earth.

Spewing toxins into the water is like pissing and shitting in your drinking water.

Spewing toxins into the air is like sitting in an airtight room with a burning tire as you hyperventilate.

All humans have limited knowledge and those who are ‘specialists' have a limited perception due to their lack of a broad depth of knowledge.

Mass media exists, not to enlighten and inform, but to sell product.

The 'product' may be a consumer good, an individual running for office or an idea espoused by a ‘think tank'. (Think tank is a misnomer as 'think tank' are really just partisan public opinion generating entities.)

Government institutions practice social control in an attempt to get the populace to conform to ‘Big Brother's' idea of how people should live and behave.

The Earth is a beautiful and wonderful place that would be much nicer if humanity did not find nature offensive.

Nature, in and of itself, is perfect.

Humanities desire for living in a fantasy as opposed to living in reality is the one major thing that threatens to annihilate humanity. Those that hold fantasy positions will make incorrect decisions based on faulty data.

I suggest that humanity stop the war against reality and declare a new war - a war on fantasy.

"We have fed the heart on fantasies and the heart has grown brutal from the fare" - William Butler Yeats

"For the truth is that life on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost. The individual suspects as much, but is terrified to encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over it, behind which he can make believe that everything is clear." - Jose Ortega y Gasset

fancy

To love.

Of superior grade; fine.

Amorous or romantic attachment; love.

Executed with skill; complex or intricate.

Bred for unusual qualities or special points.

Something many humans believe that is false.

A capricious notion; a whim; liking or inclination.

An image or a fantastic invention created by the mind.

To believe without sufficient evidence or proof; to imagine.

That which pleases or entertains the taste or caprice without much use or value.

Inclination; liking, formed by caprice rather than reason; as, to strike one's fancy.

An image or representation of anything formed in the mind; conception; thought; idea; conceit.

The mental faculty through which whims, visions, and fantasies are summoned up;
imagination, especially of a whimsical or fantastic nature.

superstition

Superstition, from the Latin word "superstes," surviving, is the symbol surviving the idea which it represents; it is the form preferred to the thing, the rite without reason, faith become insensate through isolating itself. It is in consequence the corpse of religion, the death of life, stupefaction substituted for inspiration.

Fanaticism is superstition become passionate, its name comes from the word "fanum," which signifies "temple," it is the temple put in place of God, it is the human and temporal interest of the priest substituted for the honor of priesthood, the wretched passion of the man exploiting the faith of the believer.

Superstition is religion interpreted by stupidity; fanaticism is religion serving as a pretext to fury. Those who intentionally and maliciously confound religion itself with superstition and fanaticism, borrow from stupidity its blind prejudices, and would borrow perhaps in the same way from fanaticism its injustices and angers.

Eliphas Levi

the truth about vampires

There really are vampires. Vampires do not literally physically suck blood. Vampires suck the life from an individual soul. Vampires have sold themselves to spiritual corruption and must suck life from other human's souls to sustain the corrupt fantasy they have placed in their own imaginations in place of reality.

the truth about zombies

There really are zombies. Zombies are not literally physically dead. Zombies walk around in a haze and are unable to 'see' reality because they live in a fantasy reality. Zombies suck the life from other human's souls. Zombies have sold their souls to spiritual corruption and must suck life from those around them to sustain the corrupt fantasy they have placed in their own imaginations in place of reality.

Physically 'zombies' actually do exist. Individuals that have been deprived of salt and have undergone hypnosis through Voodoo in the Carribean actually do behave like the ‘zombies' in The Night of the Living Dead.

the truth about wizards

The word wizard may come from the Persian word wazir. The wazirs belonged to the ruling classes of the civizations of Central Asia. Wazirs were also called Tajik, men of the pen or wise men. The term wizard is a bastard child of wazir brought to the West by the knights of the First Crudsade and was typically bestowed upon men of learning, the Alchemists.

See A False Reality

See thought image

See Separation from Nature

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