Tectonic Strain Theory (TST): Relational to Paranormality

Tectonic Strain Theory (TST): Relational to Paranormality: An Analytic Idealist, Metaphysical Response:

By: Ron Yacovetti - 2024

Addressing a full room at the NJ ParaUnity Expo, Woodbridge NJ - 2024

Analytic Idealism (A Metaphysics briefly explained for context):

We start from the ground up, meaning that before we play the game we define it and the field upon which it is played. To run with the metaphor, to realize one is playing hockey on a basketball court would remove purpose, plausibility and coherence. In other words it would not work nor would it make any sense to do. So, for the purposes of addressing TST, I will begin with the exposition of the metaphysics or lens through which I see reality…Analytic Idealism.

We start with Ontology, the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being, which is something that philosophy attempts to define but science should not and cannot define. Science tells us what nature does, doesn’t do, will do next but not what it is, in and of itself. Metaphysics by definition does not mean spiritual stuff that is beyond science and understanding, as today’s paranormal culture would suggest. It literally means “that which stands behind the physics”. So the science of physics tells us what the behavior is, but not what IS behaving. That’s something for philosophy to postulate. Under Idealism, reality is mental. A universal consciousness from which we are each individuated as a fractal parts, dissociated from each other.The model for this we see in nature is D.I.D. Dissociative Identity Disorder - formerly called Multiple personality disorder. One mind which appears as multiple centers of identity. 

The dissociation is why we identify as individuals, do not read each other’s minds, and have our own private conscious inner life. This cosmic mind or consciousness is mental in nature but it is not my thoughts or yours, but in the same way my thoughts appear objective to you, these mental processes appear to us both, as objective and outside of us. Under idealism, what we perceive to be physical is a representation of the world out there, as experienced through our limited sensory input. It is not the thing in and of itself. Our perception of reality is not a mirroring of the world out there. We know this to be true via our inability to see the full spectrum of light or hear the full spectrum of sound. It is then safe to extrapolate from this, that reality, in its entirety, is not something we can perceive and know directly through acquaintance.

Like a pilot in a cockpit, we rely on sensors that measure the world around us, to help us navigate life. The difference is that the pilot never mistakes the dashboard for the sky - meaning what the sensors measure he/she does not take AS the sky itself, the clouds and winds, etc. - but when we say that the world we experience is physical, outside of consciousness, which is somehow created in/by our brain, we are doing just that - mistaking the dials and dashboard FOR the sky. We don’t even have reason to believe that the thing represented resembles the appearance of the representation or image of it. The pilot’s dashboard certainly does not look like the sky.

The brain is in consciousness, not the other way around. In order to measure, calculate, describe anything, we must first perceive it; perception comes first. And to perceive, one must be conscious. Consciousness is primary. All we know is our experience. Everything else is an abstraction. This is the lens of Analytic Idealism, as a basis for reality, aka metaphysics. And since around the 1940’s quantum mechanics has shown physicality is the result of measurement. Things we observe and measure do not have their physical parameters which then reveal themselves WHEN we measure. Measurement is what gives them physical parameters. This is important to understand the perspective from which I am presenting my thoughts. Universal phenomenal consciousness is like a lake, and each thing nature does, such as us, as we are part of nature or reality, is a ripple on the lake. Ripples can be measured to show height, length, breadth, speed, angular momentum, etc. but there is nothing to the ripple BUT the lake. It is a doing of the lake, not something in and of itself. You can’t remove it from the lake. This, we see our beingness as, amidst the collective mind at large.

Now, onto TST…

TST & The Paranormal:

First and foremost, in order to attribute any alleged phenomena to TST, it would need to be determined to be applicable from both a temporal and proximity perspective. In other words, did it happen recently and close enough to have any influence, with regard to the location of alleged paranormal activity being assessed. You would also want to determine if the same region and applicable area experienced the phenomena that TST may have caused, during times when no seismic activity took place and beyond the estimated window of time within which any residual effect could still be at play. In other words, is it still viable support for phenomena which people interpret to be ghosts or ET’s etc, when TST would not be plausible to award causal power? In such instances, at the time when the experiences would have just happened, TST would not be applicable. This is just to eliminate the idea of using TST as grounds to disqualify all paranormality or unusual phenomena with no regard for its limitations, which the ghost hunting field could easily end up doing. Pointed out purely to keep things in perspective.

In looking through attributes of TST it is noted that it is highly correlational, from a support standpoint. THIS is a key thing to keep in mind as it is another paranormal trap our field often falls into, almost routinely. This confusion of causality and correlation is precisely what  leads to folks attributing consciousness to being a creation of the brain due to activity that often, but not always, correlates with experience, as witnessed via brain scans such as EEG or fMRI. A good way to see why this should not be the go to logic, is in this example…We can almost always correlate a plumber with a leaky pipe and flooded basement, but that is not to say that the plumber is the cause of the broken pipe and flooding. See what I mean?

A recurring correlation does not imply causality. TST and geomagnetic forces/energies released could also be functioning in a way akin to how a radio works with a radio signal. The signal remains undetectable to us, despite having our dashboard of dials as sensors (sight, hearing, etc), but once a radio modulates the signal, we then, through our auditory sensors, experience the sound and music. This could be what the TST effects are doing, simply modulating what we would not otherwise see or hear, and thus we see and hear them. This does not, by extension, suggest these things are intelligent spirit energies/entities, ships from outer space, etc. But in all fairness, it does not mean that they aren’t. THIS is where we aggregate additional evidence and environmental details to determine if, for example, a luminous sighting, is an intelligently piloted craft from the far reaches of the galaxy or simply a luminous energy normally invisible to us, now modulated into sight sensory availability. We should lean into what seems most plausible, most parsimonious and all without inventing or assuming factors involved in the experience that we have no way of knowing, testing or backing. In theorizing, these unknown aspects that one assumes just happens or bypasses explaining as if it is just a given, are known as hidden variables.

In ghost hunting there is a widespread causal/correlative confabulation or belief that spirits drain batteries to manifest or do things we can witness. No data suggests this as a truth and in fact, couldn’t the manifesting of something deemed paranormal be what causes the batteries to drain, an epiphenomenon of the activity, instead of the draining the batteries being the cause of the experience? Until sufficient support shows ghosts drain our 9 volts to appear, it is less outlandish to assume that the activity caused the drain or that it is not related to it at all. Here again, when you have instances of paranormality, seeing or hearing phenomena, when no battery drain takes place but batteries are certainly present at the time, we cannot ignore the occurrence happening without the draining taking place. Our field attributes the ghosts taking that energy when something happens…but not every time. And it assumes the energy in our batteries can fuel a supernatural occurrence, as well as the volitional choice by a spirit to take the energy from batteries - a process no one to my knowledge has been able to venture a decent guess at. Thinking it through beyond assumption, don’t most ghost hunters proclaim that the disembodied spirits are pure energy? So if they are, how can they believe or explain how energy needs our battery energy - or how they, as energy, are taking and using the energy in our batteries? See? It’s internally incoherent. In this belief of ghosts draining batteries there is a lot assumed and taken as a given, with no empirical support to back it whatsoever. This is called spiritual bypassing. The ghosts just know how to do it, stuff. This, we try to always be careful not to do.

This notion of TST being causally involved with strange phenomena, linked also with cultural beliefs, was driven by the work of Michael Persinger and John S. Derr. For many in the ghost hunting field, Michael’s most known work may be what has been called “The God Helmet” - The means by which this helmet was meant to induce or spur on paranormal or supernatural experiences is very much in league with the ways by which TST is linked to it in a causal fashion. Both of these MAY be able to cause the experiences people have and label as supernatural, this I was not ruling out in the above writing. They can’t simply be given license to explain all instances and should be looked at to know with the highest level of certainty, if and when they may have potentially done so.

The effects of the God Helmet on our brains, intended to open us up to experience supernatural things, is known as brain entrainment. Now if you relate this back to the metaphysics of Analytic Idealism and reality being fundamentally mental (aka consciousness) then there is no helmet - the physical thing we perceive as a helmet is the image of a mental process as perceived on our dashboard of perception. The same can be said about the energies emitted by seismic activity, as the solid physical aspects of the earth, the inanimate world, as also representations of the actual world out there, but only in as much as we can/do perceive them…something we have already acknowledged is limited for us to do. In this, the scenarios both align - mental stuff (the image of the helmet) influencing or mixing with our brain (the image of our inner phenomenal consciousness) - so it’s mental stuff mixing with mental or emotional stuff. We experience this every day, thoughts or feelings influencing the other. Nothing magical about this.The effects of the helmet and possibly the energies from seismic activity and their released energies, could simply be making one’s dissociation more porous, open and thus availing them to a broader than usual access to collective consciousness.

Conclusions:

What we think is happening with the effects of brain entrainment, is analogous to what people who meditate, do psychedelics, play that choking game…all do. The idea, in principle, is to somewhat dismantle or make more porous, the dissociation that separates us not only from each other, but from universal phenomenal consciousness - aka the cosmic mind at large. The basis of reality.

The more open or permeable our boundary is, the more we experience consciousness at a richer and more visceral level. This we know to be what brain imaging has shown during a psychedelic trip, where the experience is beyond heightened and surreal, yet the activity in the brain is drastically reduced. Important also in refuting the idea that the brain creates consciousness - because if this were the case, then EVERY time we had a heightened experience, brain activity would also spike…yet it does not. And this is how we see physical death, through an idealist perspective, that the dissociation ends (though most often gradually), as the body is the appearance OF the dissociation as experienced from someone else’s perspective. Consciousness and your experiences, memories, etc., under this metaphysics, carries on and assimilates back into the universal consciousness from which it emerged at birth, aka the onset of the dissociated state of our being.

So TST when reasonable to consider as causal in experience, we believe, is likely modulating an experience we would not have otherwise had. Whether or not it can be given credit for causing an experience would likely be best decided based on the details OF the experience. For example, if a luminous shape appears as a UAP/UFO - it could be determined to be an energy release that we just see (though I feel something is missing on this) - or - it can be what modulates something that may happen more often than we know, but only ends up being witnessed from the seismic energy affecting the environment, again modulating it. Think of night vision allowing us to see what happens in the dark, but we never say that it causes those things to happen. So without any causal explanation for TST leading to supernatural experiences, and if identical experiences happen without the influence of TST, it is most likely safe to deduce that it is either a byproduct of the experience (aka an epiphenomenon) or it helped modulate the experience so it then registered on our dashboard of dials…meaning we perceived it.This is a deep and meaningful line of discussion. This, I am sharing, is my brief delving into it and assessing from the perspective of an idealist