I have recently participated in an online conversation at another site regarding the subject of the personal self including some discussion about religion vs science and as usual the chatter wanders off into areas that I do not have much experience with or knowledge of such as psychic powers, subconscious beliefs, and mind over matter and personal growth phenomena related areas that seem so popular these days.

In this case the specific comments were focused on the site below and also about a phenomena called the ‘intention experiment’.
http://psych-k.com/home.php

Not sure if these practices fall under the ‘paranormal’ category I decided to perform a quick search of this forum and see if ithas been discussed and to my surprise I found nothing.  I was also struck by the fact that a Google search led to nothing more than a continuous stream of positive and supporting sites.  Is this real or not??

If there are any opinions or thoughts about this area of mind matters I would appreciate your thoughts.  Thanks!!

I’m a little confused about the subject of your post. You have a number of different and apparently unrelated phenomena all jumbled together.

Psychic powers are not real.

“Subconscious beliefs” are real to an extent; we do have motivations of which we are not conscious, or at least so it would appear. Though I suspect that the theories in question may make more of those motivations than there is to make.

“Mind over matter”: insofar as you are talking about telekinesis, there’s nothing real to it. But the mind is a product of the brain, and to that extent “mind over matter” is simply “matter over matter”; we can cause things with our mind, because our mind is our brain and we can cause things with our brain.

“Personal growth phenomena”: I have no idea what that means. Clearly we grow biologically and psychologically. That’s banal. I suspect there’s more that they’re suggesting with those terms, however. I don’t have time to look through the website you link to; it looks definitely woo-woo.

... ah, and welcome to the forum.

Have you seen this? Derren Brown shows his “psychic powers” using a Voodoo Doll.