Zener Card Diary Entry July 17, 2020
I had decided to take time off from writing this series to focus on self-learning. I realized that as I got into this private study I needed to know more than I did.
During the time off I was able to earn two online diplomas. One in Transpersonal Psychology and another in Parapsychology from the Center of Excellence. Now, this doesn’t make me an expert on these topics. What it does do is give me some confidence to report back something well-formed. If you are curious about my other credentials you can learn more here.
I believe that extrasensory perception is real. The trouble with believing this is that you can’t exactly prove it. The degree in which extrasensory perception exists in people is highly variable. It isn’t something that is easily measured or detected in human beings.
What I do know is that we all have is some sort of latent ability to feel and know things well beyond our regular senses.
What follows next is the path I followed to get to where I am now. We will look at the cards I used, how I did the test, and some of the phenomena that occurred.
The Bootstrapped Zener Card Deck
I had used many decks of cards during these tests, and I ended up settling on a custom made deck based on the five western elements.
When I first started doing the Zener card tests I was using a modified deck of Tarot cards. I would take an equal number of cards from each suit and major trumps. This gave me five sets of an equal amount of cards. After all, the Zener card deck is five sets of five symbols to make 25 cards.
The greatest number of cards you can have in a bootstrapped Zener Tarot card deck is 70. Ace through to King in each suit is 14 cards. You can then choose 14 major trumps to act as the fifth set.
When I first started these tests I kept the aces and the magician out. I would have 13 of each suit, and 13 major trumps in the deck to make up 65 cards. I would arrange each suit and the magician in front of me. I would then perform a close deck test. I would make my guesses by placing a card face down in front of the card suit I thought it was. Then I would calculate my guesses after.
This test worked well for a while and reduced some sensory leak. After a few sessions you begin to see sensory to leak to skew the results. The piles build up and you can see patterns form in the piles.
I saw some cool things using that method, but they ended up being cluster illusions. A cluster illusion happens when the observer see’s patterns in random data. This created a cognitive bias where I thought I was seeing something significant when I wasn’t.
The Test
I had gotten to a point where I had settled on a specific version of the Zener card test. What I would do is shuffle the deck and make my guess, reveal the card, record my answer, and then shuffle the deck again. This method is called the seen open deck method and gives no possibility of a sensory leak (that is providing you are shuffling the cards without being able to see them). After each guess, I would shuffle well and make sure to avoid sensory leak. With the deck shuffled the odds are reset. This is the ideal test method.
The other possibility is using a closed deck. After each guess, you remove the card from the deck. If you are making guesses using this method you must reveal your answers at the end of the test. If you check your answers after each guess you will create a sensory leak. The leak will allow you to logically deduce your next guess consciously or subconsciously. This is the first test method I used, and it is not ideal to collect accurate data.
Out of the two methods the seen open deck test method is best to use on yourself and for others.
The Cards
From the beginning of April to now (July 2020) I have been using custom made cards for these tests. I got them printed at make playing cards dot com.
The cards I made for the test are based on the five western elements: fire, air, water, earth, and spirit. I got the idea of using the five elements from my studies in Golden Dawn magick.
The deck contains all the possible sub-elements from the five elements, and the five core elements themselves. 25 sub-elements are made up of an element inside another.
To learn more about the connection to Golden Dawn read this Zener card diary entry.
The deck size is 75 cards. I did this so I could have symmetry. This would give 25 sub-elements and then 50 of the regular elements. I thought this was a good choice because it would take 2 elements to make up a sub-element. Having twice as many regular elements to make sub-elements made sense to me.
Changing the Test With New Cards
The Zener card test has not changed since it was created in the early 20th century. The test remains the same to this day. Guess five sets of five cards and see how many you get right.
The sub-element cards have two elements present on the card. I decided to incorporate that into the testing by allowing my guess to count if I got at least one of the elements right on the card. So, if I guessed fire and the card was air in fire, I would be correct.
Think of the sub-element cards as wild cards in the Zener card test. They help improve the odds of getting a correct guess, but only slightly.
The Chance Potential of the Elemental Cards
My custom made elements deck has 75 cards in total. 50 have one element on them. 25 of them have two elements on them. 5 of those sub elemental cards contain the same element. Therefore, 55 cards have one possible correct guess with 20 cards that have two possible correct guesses.
With the deck made up of 75 cards, one draw would have a 73% chance of getting a regular element or a sub-element within itself. There is a 26% chance of getting a sub-element with two elements on it from any given draw.
Drawing a sub-element with two elements gives you a 40% chance of being right (2 out of 5). Getting a regular element or a sub-element within itself gives you a 20% chance of being right (1 out of 5).
73% of the time you have a 20% chance of getting the right answer, and 26% of the time you have a 40% chance of getting the right answer.
73; 20 & 26; 40.
Feedback and Experience
The biggest thing I learned from performing these tests is that there is a problem of fatigue. It’s exhausting to perform 25 guesses. It took close to an hour to go through 25 guesses while shuffling the cards each time.
On May 2nd, 2020 I tested myself and another person with the custom elemental deck. I did 25 guesses with the open seen method. This was done live over Instagram with myself and another platform user as my subject. I scored 3 out of 25 hits for a 12% hit rate, and my subject scored 8 out of 25 hits for a hit rate of 32%. This was significant because they were able to score well over 20%.
The subject’s feedback was that it was exhausting to go through that many guesses. This ended up causing stress in the subject. Many times the subject would second guess themselves and get wrong answers. Their intuition was usually correct had they not second-guessed it.
What I did find was that when the subject guessed correctly, it was absolutely correct. The subject felt strongly about it. It was also very quick, they knew right away it was a correct answer.
What I began to see is that correct guesses came in sudden flashes. This observation was proved by myself and by other subjects who reported similar experiences. Most if not all the correct answers were realized quickly.
Phenomenon Break Down
During the Zener card test, we experienced a variety of para-psychological phenomenon. During the live Instagram sessions I was stimulating a kind of telepathy in people for entertainment. This can be called mentalism.
I believe that most of the mental phenomenon did not come from telepathy. I never made an active point to focus my thoughts on the subject or have them focus on my thoughts. I asked the subjects only to guess what card it could be, and I let them do the rest.
If telepathy was happening I was not attempting to stimulate it. Despite this, there is the possibility this phenomenon could be explained as general extrasensory perception. This is where information can be acquired from another person’s mind, or clairvoyance, or both.
In some cases, I had a subject report some level of Clairsentience, some kind of physical feeling. I cannot be sure what this was because the subject was not able to accurately report the experience. It could have been a strong gut feeling rather than a physical feeling.
I thought about precognition and how that may play into these scenarios. This is a form of extrasensory perception that allows knowledge of a future event. In the case of guessing cards, it would be the knowledge of the card a few seconds into the future.
I believe the strongest phenomenon was clairvoyance. This is the paranormal acquisition of information concerning an object. In this case, the objects were cards. In many cases, I experienced the name of the element I was guessing from my inner dialog. It happened in quick flashes from my inner eye.
The Proof
I had been doing the Zener card test since March 2020. During that time I had experienced no significant results except a few high spots during my closed deck method testing.
I didn’t start using the open seen method of testing until April 2020. Throughout April I had experienced no significant results. However, on May 2nd, 2020 I had a subject that scored 8 hits out of 25 guesses for a hitting percentage of 32%. That session was significant, but still within the realm of chance.
Based on Wikipedia’s entry for the Zener card test, the odds of getting 8 or more is about 10.9% if we were using just the 25 card deck. In the case of the elemental deck, the odds would be different. In any case, the odds of getting that many hits are still low. So what seems like something significant was just highly un-probable.
A suggestion made by one of my subjects was to do only 5 guesses to avoid fatigue. After the above-mentioned session, I started doing 5 guess test sessions with myself and others on Instagram live.
On May 14th, 2020 I had a strange session. I tested someone in the Instagram live chat. Instead of making a guess one at a time, the subject texted back all their guesses back to me in the live chat. They gave their answer in order, and I drew the cards and counted if it was right or not. The subject got 2 out of 5 right for a 40% hit chance. Significant in an odd ball way.
I kept on doing tests with myself and with others. The test results usually came back with a 20% hit percentage, 1 out of 5 guesses correct.
On May 29th, 2020 I had experienced the highest hit percentage yet. I had achieved 3 out of 5 guesses giving me a 60% hit percentage using my custom elemental deck. This included the sub elements.
It was done with the open seen method of testing and I did it live on Instagram.
I was very shocked to get that last card right. I guessed fire and the element card came up as fire in fire. It had only one possible correct answer.
Can we use this as proof for extrasensory perception? Or is this some aleatoric trickery with this new deck? The odds of this customized deck are much different than the original 25 card Zener card deck.
What I can say is that this will be an ongoing study. This article covers everything I know and experienced up to now (July 2020). There is still much to learn about this mental phenomenon. I look forward to more private studies and testing.
Other articles you may like.
Zener Card Diary Entry 1
How Tarot Cards Work
Your Path to Tarot