I predict that devilsknew will learn how to use paragraphs soon… or I will bitch about long texts… 
Might I recommend the Skeptics Dictionary ? Read "Selective Memory entry.
Basically if no earthquake like you “predicted” had come along… you would simply forget about the prediction. The fact that one happened mean you get to “remember” and think about being psychic… but not those “failed” predictions.
I see 6 paragraphs here that I have broken with a single return. Am I supposed to double line?
This sentence is confusing enough without this use of a priori, which I’m 99% sure is wrong.
I don’t think the parallels are obvious at all. You wrote a haiku set on a beach and decided to make up a connection. What do the gulls have to do with the tsunami? What about the sandpiper? And I’m pretty sure there was only one wave. On September 10, 2001 I picked up a story I hadn’t touched in months, wrote a scene where an aircraft crashed into a building, and finished the thing. You think I’m the only person in the world who did that?
I appreciate your effort to take my question at face value. However, since I am not a magician and do not concentrate on mystical things, I still cannot really make heads or tails of this talk of elementals and manifestations. I will accept your claim that you are not trying to hoax anyone and point out that you are trying to have an intellectual debate with skeptics using the assumptions and vocabulary of mystics. I can look all around my den and see things that I can associate with Earth, Air, Fire, or Water. However, once you start describing any event as a “manifestation”, you have already done so much subjective evaluation as to leave little room for a skeptic to be able to offer you much in response. If you really want skeptics to address the events in question, I recommend that you try describing them using more scientific language (I saw a man with x features as opposed to I saw a man who was clearly a manifestation of Earth).
If you are witnessing manifestations of elementals, you do not have the “occupational distancing and seperation [sic]” that you are claiming.
I think that several people have pointed out repeatedly that for someone to conclude there is going to be a big earthquake at some future time is not an uncharacteristically weird conclusion. It is a perfectly reasonable conclusion that is practically guaranteed to be proven correct. Any feelings of foreboding you experience while determining this just don’t seem to be particularly significant.
I don’t know of any person that does not “believe in symbols”. This web page is covered with them. We are using the symbols known as the alphabet to communicate specific messages to each other. That is quite different from supposing that symbols might appear on their own. If the letter ‘Q’ starts appearing at random in my daily life, it would have to be a strange coincidence or an effort at communication by some other being. Whom do you suppose is trying to communicate with you? Why do you suppose they are doing it in such a needlessly mysteious way? Why have they chosen you to communicate to? What do you reckon their intentions are? What do you think they have achieved by it? You certainly didn’t do anything to avert this disaster or protect anyone from it.
Makes sense. I note that there has yet to be a major earthquake in Ohio, despite your premonition.
Seems clear to me that numerous people have answered that it is coincidence, in ways that are polite and sincere, and in ways that are not. Your response has been to try to re-describe the events using even more mystical language and adding more evocative details. Your response makes your claim extremely suspect. You ask a question, people give you an answer and provide reasons they believe the answer to be correct, and you ignore both the answers and reasons and embark on a quest to ask the question in different ways.
Here is a “psychic” prediction for you: You can keep asking the question in new and unusual ways, and you wil continue to get the same answers from the skeptics here.
The thing I have never figured out is why magical thinkers so blithely assume that if God, or the universe, or some unnamed mystical force wanted to communicate a message to them, the communication would be in an obscure, mysterious form that would be ridiculously easy to overlook and damn near impossible to understand.
I tend to assume that if God has something to say to me, he’ll do me the common courtesy of saying it in a way that I am not likely to misunderstand.
Oh, and yes, you should, in fact, use two taps of the ‘Enter’ key to indicate a paragraph. This block paragraphing is more pleasing to the eye in a non-narrative document and much easier for the rest of us to read.
-VM
Main Entry: a pri·o·ri
Pronunciation: "ä-prE-'Or-E, "a-; “A-(”)prI-'Or-"I, -"prE-'Or-E; -'or-
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin, literally, from the former
1 a : DEDUCTIVE b : relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions – compare A POSTERIORI c : presupposed by experience
2 a : being without examination or analysis : PRESUMPTIVE** b : formed or conceived beforehand**
I was using definiition 2.b…
or simply, that the “Earthquake experience” was important in that it came before all of the symbolism.
The meaning of my haiku text isn’t so much assigned, as self-evident and existant without cajoling or any leap of logic. It has striking meaning to me personally both objectively and subjectively, maybe not so much for you. Sure, it doesn’t corrolate exactly to events but that may be an unnecessary restriction we apply. It may be a prejudice arising from man’s own lingual specifity. Archetypes, the language of the universe, so to speak, are primal crystalline constructs and are very basic in nature but have wide psychic structures. Maybe it’s like the idea of “Om” and the contention that it is the primal word and contains everything within it, the Alpha and Omega so to speak. I don’t know.
As far as me not being the only person to have such an experience or writing something similar, would the frequency of the message really diminish or increase its impact…I mean when you want to send a message, you repeat MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! three times. If there is no answer…switch the channel…repeat.
You’re flat-out wrong, again, since I see no meaningful connection whatsoever.
If you’re going to cheat this blatantly, you should at last be aware of it. You said it applies somehow, but it doesn’t, so now you’re trying to say it shouldn’t have to apply. What’s worth reporting about your experience in the first place if it’s not rare, specific, useful, or even coherent?
Diminish, because of the above.
Your warning didn’t do any good for anybody and was so vague as to be useless. So for me at least, “revelation” is not the first word that pops to mind. And a warning from who or for what purpose?
It’s beyond obvious at this point that you’re not interested in what anybody says because you’re convinced you’re psychic. It’d be a lot more honest if you’d just admit it instead of this “I don’t believe this was a psychic premonition” stuff. What the heck are you reporting if you don’t think that’s what it was?
Because politicians need the votes and businesses need the customers?
Okeley dokeley.
BTW- I asked my Thintronix oracle (manufactured in the mystically significant year MMIIV<and rated at exactly 3.0 V>, by the Hasbro corporation and karmically compliant with part 1.5 of the mystical laws of the FCC) whether you had a psychic experience. It beeped in its secret and sacred tongue. The diodes emmitted their lights. The answer was delivered up “Not likely.”
Hey, that’s my impression and an accurate descriptor. If you take exception with my style of writing, language, and conception then I suggest that is a deeply embedded prejudice and I concede to that which you think I am.
I mean, if you want to take me to task on archetypes, I’ve sorted through some shit in my day. I’m a bipolar, overweight, saved by jesus, buddhist/taoist convert, ex-boyfriend of a wiccan high priestess, fluent German speaking, magician.
I dare you.
oh, and I write haiku…
And when you ask for responses from skeptics to statements written in the language of mysticism, you may as well by speaking German to English-speakers. You are building your argument almost solely on assumptions (note your description of archetypes as the “language of the universe”) that pretty much no skeptic shares with you.
From where I’m sitting, this collection of assumptions pretty much requires you to believe you’ve had some sort of psychic experience. Those of us who don’t share your assumptions believe that all the facts in evidence pretty much require us to believe that you have not.
-VM
I do not assume I’ve had a psychic, supernatural, or otherwise religous experience. I hope that you realize that this is seperate in language and ideal from a so-called psychic experience, I am not making an argument for the existence of psychic ability as most would perceive it, I am simply relating my impression of a watershed experience of extreme symbolic nature.
I would hope that this impasse between “skeptics” and “believers” end in the discovery and exploration of a middle ground within logic and science. Something that considers the mystical and the rational in equal parts and searches earnestly for answers, instead of outright rejection based on prejudice-- My concepts and terminology of Archetypes are within the science of Psychology and I don’t understand why skeptics here would not be able to understand my language, It is not written in the language of mysticism but rather I am talking about mysticism objectively. From an experiential POV this event can explained away in my mind rationally in any number of ways (and quite successfully by many of you) but there is a deeper meaning to this in my heart and very fiber of being and it has its own logic and denouement. I value and respect everybody’s insight and thank all for the time and effort that you have taken to offer your views and arguments, please note that I am not ignoring you or discarding your ideas or opinions if I have not responded individually to your posts, I am just not that argumentative and lack motivation to form a cogent defense out of pure academics, and ultimately I am not seeking to purvey nor defend an ideology.
And If we must polarize this, you might consider me a hard skeptic from my inside knowledge of magic and self-proclaimed cynicism yet paradoxically from my experiences and impressions I regularly and acutely experience, feel, and believe in a greater formative power and intention within life, the universe, and everything. I don’t relate to it as the Judeo/Christian God or any other entity that requires my obedience, I beleieve that it just “is” and that science is useful and successful at offering many advances into the understanding of the universe and explaining it within its own scope and abilities.
In case you were wondering. 
Are you saying that you don’t believe omens and portents to be supernatural? Is your definition different than mine?
How can an experience have a symbolic nature? People can make symbolic gestures, but I don’t understand how something that wasn’t “done” by a person could be symbolic. Are you saying that the universe made a symbolic gesture toward you?
Here is the thing: Without scientific approaches for verifying facts, even if you do find answers, how do you know that you’ve found them? How do you distinguish “wrong” answers from “correct” answers? You have said repeatedly that this “portent” had an unexplainable emotional impact on you. Is that the measure? Before you say yes, a lot of people have tried to measure correctness in similar ways in the past, and have subsequently been shown by science to have been very wrong.
I really try to avoid demanding cites, but you’re going to have to help me out with this suggestion that an “archetypical manifestation of an elemental” is a psychological term. Because if it is, I managed to seriously skip some pages in all my textbooks.
One piece of terminology I DO remember from my psychology studies is “clanging”. It describes the use of words (or nonsense sylllables) based on sound instead of on meaning. Another is “word salad”, which is the stringing together of words in such a way that they do not convey a meaningful thought.
So, you are saying that you can evaluate the validity of your claim based on “deeper meaning” in your heart, but you don’t feel that you are claiming psychic powers?
Also, I think you may want to check the definition of “denouement”. If this word is what you really meant, I need to know what was the climax (and the source of dramatic tension), because I am confused about the narrative structure. Since you said you were reporting actual events, I was not expecting there to be a narrative structure at all.
Well, you asked for opinions, and when you didn’t like them, you dismissed them out of hand. If you are not trying to defend an ideology–and I am asking this in all sincerity–what exactly ARE you trying to do?
Knowing from experience that stage magic is illusory does not make you a skeptic. Refusing to believe otherwise without evidence would make you a skeptic. Once you’ve seen how the illusions work, you do not have to be skeptical at all to not believe that magic is happening. And your non-skeptical claims in this thread make a far stronger case for your not being a skeptic than your “self-proclaimed cynicism” does for your being one.
Believing that something “just is” without evidence is EXACTLY unlike being skeptical.
-VM
I think there will be a long, pointless debate with increasingly incoherent claims made by the OP and at least one long, long brick of storyless text with no line spaces. Don’t know when exactly but it feels close (it may have occurred already for all I know?).
Makes wild claims of supernatural or metaphysical nature
States that said claims are not supernatural or metaphysical, and rambles incoherantly about how it is metaphorical or something…
What kind of debating tactic is this? Is claiming that your obvious stance is not the real stance somehow give you an edge in battle? Convince your enemy that you are not holding a sword, but just the symbol of a sword, and if he is stupid enough to believe you, you can win? What kind of thinking is this?
Only the devil knows.
You’ve got it wrong. You convince your enemy that he is holding just the symbol of a sword. Confuse him enough, and then convince him that you can prove it’s not a real sword if you can have it for a moment. At that point, you have two swords and he has none.