(10-29-2025, 06:43 AM)Ninurta Wrote: Notice I said "bound" by our brains and bodies, not "limited to" by them. Some people have a spark of an ability to detect those others, whether in this universe or crossing universal boundaries. That ability is not "paranormal", it's more "hypernormal" - extending beyond the normal most of us can detect into other "normals". It's not "supernatural" as in above nature, it's "hypernatural", extending into all areas of nature that some others either can't, or won't detect.
Discussions of ectoplasm seem to be mainly confined to the Victorian Era, among occultists and spiritualists. I've never seen a photo of it from that period that I am willing to trust as genuine, but that don't mean that some "fakers" weren't trying to represent, in a limited way, some real phenomena that other folks were actually observing with their own (made of energies, detecting other energies) sensory apparatuses.
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"can't, or won't detect" a little bit of both. I take a utilitarian view on it, we need a semblance of normal to survive. I'm not in a position to discount the supernatural but I do think generally we are capable of doing just more. Some of the ESP and PK effects are just as you said hyper-normal and it's that way until it becomes normal.
Rudolf Steiner so far is the most interesting person and I need to checkout the other authors, but I feel the 'ectoplasm' topic is pretty much dead from my side. If I find anything interesting from the others I will post.
My main grievance with 'ectoplasm' is that the methods described are not for producing ectoplasm because I happen to know those practices and the photo's just seems fake and not matching lore. If it looks like cheesecloth, it's probably cheesecloth and the gross look is the contents of the persons stomach that swallowed it or whatever they do. It was described in one account as coming out like a string and then later became gross..