NEW MILLENNIUM PSI RESEARCH
ESP, Hypnosis, Paraphysics, and Remote Viewing
http://psiona.50megs.com/
Iona Miller, 2003
Organization for the Advancement of Knowledge, Grants Pass, Oregon
"One really should start thinking in terms of biomind receptors, rather than in terms of ESP"
--Ingo Swann
for more on PSI History, see
http://mankindresearchunlimited.weebly.com
SHOT IN THE DARK-SIDE OF THE MOON
While on his journey to the moon and back, astronaut Edgar Mitchell conducted an unscheduled experiment of his own. On June 22, 1971, he informed the New York Times that:
"During the Apollo 14 lunar expedition I performed an extrasensory-perception experiment the world's first in space. In it five symbols a star, cross, circle, wavy line and square were oriented randomly in columns of 25. Four persons in the United States attempted to guess the order of the symbols. They were able to do this with success that could be duplicated by chance in one out of 3,000 experiments.”
He claimed, in effect, that his demonstration showed that ESP was independent of shielding, locale, distance, or time. When he got back to planet Earth, he founded The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), noetic meaning consciousness studies. That program, now run by parapsychologist Dean Radin, is still thriving and the Institute recently moved to larger quarters in an old school in Petaluma, California. IONS is celebrating its 30th anniversary.
MAKES ME WANT TO PSI
The spontaneous event commonly called psychic experience, perception or ability is called 'psi' in scientific arenas. Even more precisely, it is now often referred to as anomalous cognition (AC). A particular form of intentional AC is known as Remote Viewing. Between 1978-1995 the U.S. government sponsored the Stargate Program, in conjunction with Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a psyops development think tank.
The existence of psi or ESP abilities has been hotly debated among scientists for decades, since J. B. Rhine began his experiments in 1927. Both the pro (Dean Radin; Ingo Swann; Jessica Utts, Russell Targ; Hiroshi Motoyama) and con (James Randi, Susan Blackmore, CSICOPS) positions have their "true believers", and it seems never the twain shall meet.
Psi is still a paradigm that lives on the outskirts trying to become a sanctioned science. But just because a subject is controversial, and happens to be a space and time transcending experience, doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it. In fact, it beckons us to focus on it even more thoroughly to reveal the truths hidden there. We simply need to do it with stringent, critic-proof methodology.
There are a variety of psi powers, known for centuries in Eastern philosophy as siddhas, exceptional human abilities. The uninitiated or skeptical may be perplexed or daunted at the prospect of coming to any rational conceptual understanding of these anomalous phenomena, which have been associated with the realm of mysticism, superstition and the supernatural.
In actual fact, research by the authors, who are both certified hypnotherapists (A.C.H.E.), and others (Miller; Ryzl) shows that nearly anyone can improve their psi ability through simple techniques of self-hypnosis.
Psi is also at the root of focused intent, distant mental interactions, distance healing and therapeutic rapport, where there is a subtle shared consciousness and often brainwave synchronization. This capacity is within everyone’s grasp, as the human potential movement demonstrated with such trance phenomena as fire walking and guided imagery.
We've virtually all had those uncanny or awesome experiences where we seemed to intuit, dream, or "know" something in advance of conventional means. Sometimes it is called pre-sentiment. Around 55% of reported incidents occur in dreams. Another example, is the synchronicity at work in the affairs of “star-crossed lovers.” When we are in love, we seem to share the same “wavelength,” virtually able to read one another’s minds. Who hasn’t thought of a friend or acquaintance only to have the phone ring?
Often the most compelling stories come from those who don't even "believe" in the phenomenon, but find themselves experiencing it, usually in the unfortunate circumstance of the illness, injury or death of a distant loved-one. Psi is not just a mental perception or conception; we feel it in our guts, in our bones, in our marrow. It is first and foremost a holistic mind/body experience.
According to leading parapsychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner, "At one level of investigation, there already are 'replications' and 'battle-tested' results, specifically the finding that about 50% of an unselected group will report having had a 'psychic experience,' supposedly involving those psi phenomena that have been given such labels as 'telepathy', 'clairvoyance', 'precognition', and 'psychokinesis' [mind over matter]. This percentage may vary from one culture, age group, and educational level to the next, but it has been repeated, in one study after another, for the last several decades."
The move in biophysics is to take psi research from endless theorization, proofs of existence and boring replications into innovative and practical experimentation. The problem is that in order to do that scientifically, one has to risk credibility and professional suicide, as well as being underfunded.
OPEN SESAME
Though it often seems confined to mediums, channels, sensitives, or ESPers, most individuals are capable of expressing some nonlocal communication or psi phenomena. However, that ability may be blocked for various reasons by an adaptation to consensus reality, to conventional thinking. We need to develop “out of the box” thinking. Even Einstein said that past, present, and future are illusions, even if they are stubborn ones. Conscious calculation rarely plays a role in ESP; the same is true for creativity.
Both ESP and creativity have deep taproots in the psyche. Pang and Forte (1967) found some evidence of a relationship between creativity and ESP, as did others (Honorton, 1967). Frederick Myers reported that a large proportion of ESP experiences occur in altered states such as dreams, trance, hypnosis and creativity while Masters and Houston (1966) counted it among the varieties of psychedelic experience.
ESP, hypnosis and mind-expanded states have sensitivity to the unconscious at their core. And that subconscious expresses itself through symbols, imagery, and sensations to communicate with the conscious mind. Hypnosis is the "open sesame" to the waking impressions and sensory images of the deeper mind/body.
The elusive ability to swing back 'the doors of perception' and enter the numinous realm of the collective unconscious was described by psychologist C. G. Jung. Whether deliberate or accidental, anyone can open to the force of this revealed process, to this dynamic information field. Those who frustrate themselves with self-defeating behavior in other areas of life often show poor psi performance.
Positive ESP scores seem to correlate generally with traits such as openness, high self-esteem, warmth, sociability, adventuresomeness, relaxation, assertiveness, talkativeness and practicality. However, some psi-talented individuals often don't score well in laboratory settings.
On the other hand Russell Targ (1994) claims, "[P]si is no longer elusive; it can be demonstrated when needed for study and investigation." Even though psychic training to strengthen the signal line is possible, unpredictability has been the hallmark of this emergent gift. To overcome this problem in both the theoretical and experimental arenas requires a marriage of the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and hypnosis.
Findings from all these fields converge in the paradoxical subject of Extra-Sensory Perception. As the ideas of quantum mechanics, relativity and parapsychology slowly make their way into our collective consciousness, our common-sense views on time and causality find themselves more strained than they've ever been in the course of human history.
Will this challenge remain the domain of theoretical science, or can we foresee a day in which the general understanding, and even the experience of the average individual, will be shaped by this new perspective on reality? (Sidorov, 2003, “The Mind In Time”).
It takes many disciplines, as well as the latest findings in physiology, neurobiology and information theory to begin to formulate any comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and bridge the conceptual gap. ESP used to be studied in Parapsychology, an adjunct of psychology. But its subject matter has become so mainstream, the field has been return to ordinary Psychology. ESP “software” is studied in psychology, but ESP “hardware” is the domain of biophysics.
Researchers are probing the interface between matter, spacetime and mind with increasing precision. There is optimism that ultimately conventional pathways will be found to explain their appearance. Suggestions have included Schumann Resonance as a nearly-instantaneous carrier of psi information or perhaps paradoxical quantum nonlocality or coherence to account for it.
There are many models that provide potentially viable explanations. The mental aspects can perhaps be described psychologically, but the mechanics require models from physics. A variety of theories have been proposed, including neurological, holographic, electromagnetic, and quantum mechanics based hypotheses.
Like electricity, no one knows how psi works. However, to foster and practice psi we don't need to know how it works, anymore than we need to know the mechanics of internal combustion to drive a car.
http://mankindresearchunlimited.weebly.com
SHOT IN THE DARK-SIDE OF THE MOON
While on his journey to the moon and back, astronaut Edgar Mitchell conducted an unscheduled experiment of his own. On June 22, 1971, he informed the New York Times that:
"During the Apollo 14 lunar expedition I performed an extrasensory-perception experiment the world's first in space. In it five symbols a star, cross, circle, wavy line and square were oriented randomly in columns of 25. Four persons in the United States attempted to guess the order of the symbols. They were able to do this with success that could be duplicated by chance in one out of 3,000 experiments.”
He claimed, in effect, that his demonstration showed that ESP was independent of shielding, locale, distance, or time. When he got back to planet Earth, he founded The Institute of Noetic Science (IONS), noetic meaning consciousness studies. That program, now run by parapsychologist Dean Radin, is still thriving and the Institute recently moved to larger quarters in an old school in Petaluma, California. IONS is celebrating its 30th anniversary.
MAKES ME WANT TO PSI
The spontaneous event commonly called psychic experience, perception or ability is called 'psi' in scientific arenas. Even more precisely, it is now often referred to as anomalous cognition (AC). A particular form of intentional AC is known as Remote Viewing. Between 1978-1995 the U.S. government sponsored the Stargate Program, in conjunction with Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a psyops development think tank.
The existence of psi or ESP abilities has been hotly debated among scientists for decades, since J. B. Rhine began his experiments in 1927. Both the pro (Dean Radin; Ingo Swann; Jessica Utts, Russell Targ; Hiroshi Motoyama) and con (James Randi, Susan Blackmore, CSICOPS) positions have their "true believers", and it seems never the twain shall meet.
Psi is still a paradigm that lives on the outskirts trying to become a sanctioned science. But just because a subject is controversial, and happens to be a space and time transcending experience, doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate it. In fact, it beckons us to focus on it even more thoroughly to reveal the truths hidden there. We simply need to do it with stringent, critic-proof methodology.
There are a variety of psi powers, known for centuries in Eastern philosophy as siddhas, exceptional human abilities. The uninitiated or skeptical may be perplexed or daunted at the prospect of coming to any rational conceptual understanding of these anomalous phenomena, which have been associated with the realm of mysticism, superstition and the supernatural.
In actual fact, research by the authors, who are both certified hypnotherapists (A.C.H.E.), and others (Miller; Ryzl) shows that nearly anyone can improve their psi ability through simple techniques of self-hypnosis.
Psi is also at the root of focused intent, distant mental interactions, distance healing and therapeutic rapport, where there is a subtle shared consciousness and often brainwave synchronization. This capacity is within everyone’s grasp, as the human potential movement demonstrated with such trance phenomena as fire walking and guided imagery.
We've virtually all had those uncanny or awesome experiences where we seemed to intuit, dream, or "know" something in advance of conventional means. Sometimes it is called pre-sentiment. Around 55% of reported incidents occur in dreams. Another example, is the synchronicity at work in the affairs of “star-crossed lovers.” When we are in love, we seem to share the same “wavelength,” virtually able to read one another’s minds. Who hasn’t thought of a friend or acquaintance only to have the phone ring?
Often the most compelling stories come from those who don't even "believe" in the phenomenon, but find themselves experiencing it, usually in the unfortunate circumstance of the illness, injury or death of a distant loved-one. Psi is not just a mental perception or conception; we feel it in our guts, in our bones, in our marrow. It is first and foremost a holistic mind/body experience.
According to leading parapsychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner, "At one level of investigation, there already are 'replications' and 'battle-tested' results, specifically the finding that about 50% of an unselected group will report having had a 'psychic experience,' supposedly involving those psi phenomena that have been given such labels as 'telepathy', 'clairvoyance', 'precognition', and 'psychokinesis' [mind over matter]. This percentage may vary from one culture, age group, and educational level to the next, but it has been repeated, in one study after another, for the last several decades."
The move in biophysics is to take psi research from endless theorization, proofs of existence and boring replications into innovative and practical experimentation. The problem is that in order to do that scientifically, one has to risk credibility and professional suicide, as well as being underfunded.
OPEN SESAME
Though it often seems confined to mediums, channels, sensitives, or ESPers, most individuals are capable of expressing some nonlocal communication or psi phenomena. However, that ability may be blocked for various reasons by an adaptation to consensus reality, to conventional thinking. We need to develop “out of the box” thinking. Even Einstein said that past, present, and future are illusions, even if they are stubborn ones. Conscious calculation rarely plays a role in ESP; the same is true for creativity.
Both ESP and creativity have deep taproots in the psyche. Pang and Forte (1967) found some evidence of a relationship between creativity and ESP, as did others (Honorton, 1967). Frederick Myers reported that a large proportion of ESP experiences occur in altered states such as dreams, trance, hypnosis and creativity while Masters and Houston (1966) counted it among the varieties of psychedelic experience.
ESP, hypnosis and mind-expanded states have sensitivity to the unconscious at their core. And that subconscious expresses itself through symbols, imagery, and sensations to communicate with the conscious mind. Hypnosis is the "open sesame" to the waking impressions and sensory images of the deeper mind/body.
The elusive ability to swing back 'the doors of perception' and enter the numinous realm of the collective unconscious was described by psychologist C. G. Jung. Whether deliberate or accidental, anyone can open to the force of this revealed process, to this dynamic information field. Those who frustrate themselves with self-defeating behavior in other areas of life often show poor psi performance.
Positive ESP scores seem to correlate generally with traits such as openness, high self-esteem, warmth, sociability, adventuresomeness, relaxation, assertiveness, talkativeness and practicality. However, some psi-talented individuals often don't score well in laboratory settings.
On the other hand Russell Targ (1994) claims, "[P]si is no longer elusive; it can be demonstrated when needed for study and investigation." Even though psychic training to strengthen the signal line is possible, unpredictability has been the hallmark of this emergent gift. To overcome this problem in both the theoretical and experimental arenas requires a marriage of the disciplines of physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and hypnosis.
Findings from all these fields converge in the paradoxical subject of Extra-Sensory Perception. As the ideas of quantum mechanics, relativity and parapsychology slowly make their way into our collective consciousness, our common-sense views on time and causality find themselves more strained than they've ever been in the course of human history.
Will this challenge remain the domain of theoretical science, or can we foresee a day in which the general understanding, and even the experience of the average individual, will be shaped by this new perspective on reality? (Sidorov, 2003, “The Mind In Time”).
It takes many disciplines, as well as the latest findings in physiology, neurobiology and information theory to begin to formulate any comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon and bridge the conceptual gap. ESP used to be studied in Parapsychology, an adjunct of psychology. But its subject matter has become so mainstream, the field has been return to ordinary Psychology. ESP “software” is studied in psychology, but ESP “hardware” is the domain of biophysics.
Researchers are probing the interface between matter, spacetime and mind with increasing precision. There is optimism that ultimately conventional pathways will be found to explain their appearance. Suggestions have included Schumann Resonance as a nearly-instantaneous carrier of psi information or perhaps paradoxical quantum nonlocality or coherence to account for it.
There are many models that provide potentially viable explanations. The mental aspects can perhaps be described psychologically, but the mechanics require models from physics. A variety of theories have been proposed, including neurological, holographic, electromagnetic, and quantum mechanics based hypotheses.
Like electricity, no one knows how psi works. However, to foster and practice psi we don't need to know how it works, anymore than we need to know the mechanics of internal combustion to drive a car.
WHAT IS PSI?
I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Non-Local and Remote Mental Interactions, which has a huge archive of psi research papers and discussion; we prepared a special issue on Remote Viewing. http://www.emergentmind.org/jnlrmi_ii(2).htm
Stargate RV expert and teacher, Joseph McMoneagle is interviewed, along with such notables as author and theoretical physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, and Finnish physicist Matti Pitkanen. Many plausible theories and new experimental protocols are being proposed, pushing the leading edge of physics, biophysics, and experimental parapsychology. Though it is often suggested, it remains to be seen if psi is a field, a quantum effect, or a physical quantity.
We are examining aspects from coherent fields to strength of intent, arousal states, target specificity, subject-target separation, psi-expectancy, anticipatory effects and information flow. Studies of field resonance, metabolism, biophotons, entanglement, geomagnetic fluctuations, time-reversed experience, energy transfer, physiological detectors, biomind receptors, psychophysical responses, bioregulation, enhanced recovery, experimenter effects, EM signatures and transduction pathways may yield more information about the process.
The areas of extrasensory perception or anomalous cognition we discuss here include (1) Telepathy; (2) Clairvoyance; and (3) Precognition. These faculties came into the public eye when stories of Russian and CIA remote viewers broke in the press. But compelling, anecdotal stories alone do not satisfy the scientific method.
Stories of distance healing, a form of PK or psychokinesis (mind over matter), require another article of their own to do them justice. It may be easier to model virtual information transfer than mind over matter. "Spooky action at a distance" requires even stronger evidence than sensing at a distance. But is "distance" here really a factor or an illusion in a holographic simply-connected universe? The paradox of spacetime and relativity presents itself in psi as psycho-retrocognition, or time-reversed PK.
Though these experiences of knowing at a distance are called "extra-sensory," they often appear "as if" received by conventional sensory or mental means, for how else can we "know what we know"? It is a holistic psychophysical experience, affecting the whole self, physically, emotionally, mentally and often spiritually. The impediments of distance and time seem to dissolve; the barriers of spacetime are mysteriously overcome. The information is 'just there' in one form or another, whether spontaneous or facilitated.
1). Telepathy is a message, direct mind-to-mind communication, direct knowing through being, a clear intuition or empathic awareness, often demonstrated in the psychotherapeutic setting. Telepathy is a transmission from one mind to another.
2). Clairvoyance appears as information about events at remote locations, manifesting as an image, or gestalt psychic impression, rather than a thought; (it is often linked to perception at a distance: so-called astral travel, out-of-body experience, or remote viewing).
3). Precognition is the most uncanny; transcending time, it seems to rend the veils of the future (jamais vu) and the past (deja vu) with strong, often unpleasant, premonitions.
According to Scientific American (Sept. 2002, p. 103), [apparently long after Pribram's theory from the 70s], "in 1990 Herman Sno, a psychiatrist at Hospirtal de Heel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, suggested that memories are stored in a format similar to holograms. Unlike a photograph, each section of a hologram contains all the information needed to reproduce the entire picture. But the smaller the fragment, the fuzzier the resultant image. According to Sno, deja vu occurs when some small detail in one's current situation closely matches a memory fragment, conjuring up a blurry image of that former experience." There are competing theories of deja vu, but the holographic concept of reality is a leading contender in the biomechanical explanations of psi.
Psi meaning comes through emotionally intense visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. It is a human potential we can learn to tap. We can use our intentionality as a probability perturbation instrument. We can use mental focus to alternately concentrate and relax our attention. Intent is suggested as a variable in transmission and reception in the exchange of extrasensory information, possibly within the range of ELF electromagnetic frequencies (Sidorov, 2002).
Stanford and Lovin (1970) found possible support for a relationship between the generation of alpha waves and ESP, as did Monroe (1971). More recent research has implicated the electromagnetic signals of Schumann Resonances as carrier of seemingly non-local transfer of information (Pitkanin, 2001). Persinger (1989) has suggested that psi information signals are actually carried on extremely low electromagnetic frequencies and our temporal lobe structures are sensitive to them.
Whether one believes in spontaneous psi experience, or not, it has a long and colorful history, in the mystic and healing arts of the East and West, and in science, even business. The difference is the trigger that evokes the experience. Management trainers have taught self-hypnosis as a means of fostering intuition, rapport and other practical applications of ESP.
The role of ESP is inextricably bound up with other creative processes where information or inspiration seemingly appear from nowhere. Data acquired through ESP, prescient dreams and other imaginative thought processes riddles the stories of scientific discovery and creativity. Psychic detective work and investigative reporting has received mixed reviews, since following up on dry leads uses time and vital resources. Without controls, these anecdotes are difficult to evaluate.
In the arts, it has been said that "life imitates art," sometimes to uncanny proportions. Krippner (1972) recounts a story of ESP in creativity, whose prophetic detail later took on ominous tones.
In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a popular novel called Futility. It described the wreck of a giant ship called the Titan, considered "unsinkable" by the characters in the novel. Perhaps you recognize this oft-told tale as that of the Titanic, but it was not wrecked until April 15, 1912. In the novel, the ship displaced 70,000 tons (Titanic 66,000 tons), was 800 feet long (Titanic 828 feet); the Titan carried 3000 passengers and 24 lifeboats, while Titanic had only 20 lifeboats for the same number of people. Both ships sank while encountering an iceberg at the speed of 23-25 knots. The rest, as they say, is history.
Stargate RV expert and teacher, Joseph McMoneagle is interviewed, along with such notables as author and theoretical physicist, Fred Alan Wolf, and Finnish physicist Matti Pitkanen. Many plausible theories and new experimental protocols are being proposed, pushing the leading edge of physics, biophysics, and experimental parapsychology. Though it is often suggested, it remains to be seen if psi is a field, a quantum effect, or a physical quantity.
We are examining aspects from coherent fields to strength of intent, arousal states, target specificity, subject-target separation, psi-expectancy, anticipatory effects and information flow. Studies of field resonance, metabolism, biophotons, entanglement, geomagnetic fluctuations, time-reversed experience, energy transfer, physiological detectors, biomind receptors, psychophysical responses, bioregulation, enhanced recovery, experimenter effects, EM signatures and transduction pathways may yield more information about the process.
The areas of extrasensory perception or anomalous cognition we discuss here include (1) Telepathy; (2) Clairvoyance; and (3) Precognition. These faculties came into the public eye when stories of Russian and CIA remote viewers broke in the press. But compelling, anecdotal stories alone do not satisfy the scientific method.
Stories of distance healing, a form of PK or psychokinesis (mind over matter), require another article of their own to do them justice. It may be easier to model virtual information transfer than mind over matter. "Spooky action at a distance" requires even stronger evidence than sensing at a distance. But is "distance" here really a factor or an illusion in a holographic simply-connected universe? The paradox of spacetime and relativity presents itself in psi as psycho-retrocognition, or time-reversed PK.
Though these experiences of knowing at a distance are called "extra-sensory," they often appear "as if" received by conventional sensory or mental means, for how else can we "know what we know"? It is a holistic psychophysical experience, affecting the whole self, physically, emotionally, mentally and often spiritually. The impediments of distance and time seem to dissolve; the barriers of spacetime are mysteriously overcome. The information is 'just there' in one form or another, whether spontaneous or facilitated.
1). Telepathy is a message, direct mind-to-mind communication, direct knowing through being, a clear intuition or empathic awareness, often demonstrated in the psychotherapeutic setting. Telepathy is a transmission from one mind to another.
2). Clairvoyance appears as information about events at remote locations, manifesting as an image, or gestalt psychic impression, rather than a thought; (it is often linked to perception at a distance: so-called astral travel, out-of-body experience, or remote viewing).
3). Precognition is the most uncanny; transcending time, it seems to rend the veils of the future (jamais vu) and the past (deja vu) with strong, often unpleasant, premonitions.
According to Scientific American (Sept. 2002, p. 103), [apparently long after Pribram's theory from the 70s], "in 1990 Herman Sno, a psychiatrist at Hospirtal de Heel in Zaandam, the Netherlands, suggested that memories are stored in a format similar to holograms. Unlike a photograph, each section of a hologram contains all the information needed to reproduce the entire picture. But the smaller the fragment, the fuzzier the resultant image. According to Sno, deja vu occurs when some small detail in one's current situation closely matches a memory fragment, conjuring up a blurry image of that former experience." There are competing theories of deja vu, but the holographic concept of reality is a leading contender in the biomechanical explanations of psi.
Psi meaning comes through emotionally intense visual, auditory and kinesthetic experiences. It is a human potential we can learn to tap. We can use our intentionality as a probability perturbation instrument. We can use mental focus to alternately concentrate and relax our attention. Intent is suggested as a variable in transmission and reception in the exchange of extrasensory information, possibly within the range of ELF electromagnetic frequencies (Sidorov, 2002).
Stanford and Lovin (1970) found possible support for a relationship between the generation of alpha waves and ESP, as did Monroe (1971). More recent research has implicated the electromagnetic signals of Schumann Resonances as carrier of seemingly non-local transfer of information (Pitkanin, 2001). Persinger (1989) has suggested that psi information signals are actually carried on extremely low electromagnetic frequencies and our temporal lobe structures are sensitive to them.
Whether one believes in spontaneous psi experience, or not, it has a long and colorful history, in the mystic and healing arts of the East and West, and in science, even business. The difference is the trigger that evokes the experience. Management trainers have taught self-hypnosis as a means of fostering intuition, rapport and other practical applications of ESP.
The role of ESP is inextricably bound up with other creative processes where information or inspiration seemingly appear from nowhere. Data acquired through ESP, prescient dreams and other imaginative thought processes riddles the stories of scientific discovery and creativity. Psychic detective work and investigative reporting has received mixed reviews, since following up on dry leads uses time and vital resources. Without controls, these anecdotes are difficult to evaluate.
In the arts, it has been said that "life imitates art," sometimes to uncanny proportions. Krippner (1972) recounts a story of ESP in creativity, whose prophetic detail later took on ominous tones.
In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a popular novel called Futility. It described the wreck of a giant ship called the Titan, considered "unsinkable" by the characters in the novel. Perhaps you recognize this oft-told tale as that of the Titanic, but it was not wrecked until April 15, 1912. In the novel, the ship displaced 70,000 tons (Titanic 66,000 tons), was 800 feet long (Titanic 828 feet); the Titan carried 3000 passengers and 24 lifeboats, while Titanic had only 20 lifeboats for the same number of people. Both ships sank while encountering an iceberg at the speed of 23-25 knots. The rest, as they say, is history.
Dream Telepathy
FROM TRANCE TO CREATIVITY
The question becomes "How can we facilitate the emergence of psi phenomena, either for greater awareness or creativity?" Knowing what we know about psi expression, how can we train ourselves to encourage its emergence? Hypnosis or self-hypnosis simply helps engage the emotional mind, the imaginal mind, the biophysical mind rather than just approaching the task rationally and conceptually.
Unfortunately, the question of psi-facilitation was asked by covert forces during the Cold War, and much of the statistical and practical data on psi comes from those black-ops sources (CIA, KGB, NSA, DIA, DOD, U.S. Army and Navy). The Russians wanted to use psi for espionage and the US countered with its own team. Much of this government-sponsored work went on at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), by Puharich, Puthoff, Targ, and Swann. And the Eastcoast counterpart, Mankind Research Unlimited which had another psi ops team, including Milan Ryzl.
Human potential advocates, Jack Schwarz and Robert Monroe separately pursued independent, more explorative and mystical approaches. Both taught consciousness management techniques through forms of self-hypnosis. Schwarz, practicing as the Aleithea Foundation in Southern Oregon, focused on bioregulation with autohypnosis and subtle human energies.
Monroe's techniques employ neuroregulation with the frequency-following response (which he trademarked with the Monroe Institute in Virginia, as Hemi-Synch) to induce trance, entraining both hemispheres in alpha and theta (1982).
Hemi-Synch, also known as binaural beat technology, actively drives the modulation of electrocortical activity through resonance effects, changing levels of awareness and arousal, attentional focus, and cognitive content. Often combined with biofeedback, it helps shortcut processes that would take years of technologically unassisted yogic training.
Graywolf Swinney (2001), Dr. Stanley Krippner, and Iona Miller have conducted trainings in co-consciousness (Erickson, Rossi & Rossi, 1976) and theta training at Asklepia Foundation, also in Southern Oregon. A deep state of rapport is used in psychotherapeutic journey processes, employing shamanic hypnotherapeutic techniques. Theta is reportedly the psychic range of the mind, generated largely in the temporal lobes. Co-consciousness is a shared virtuality, a telepathic rapport wherein both participant's brainwaves become synchronized into a single holographic biofield (Miller and Swinney, 2000).
Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently by Persinger (1987). Consciously producing theta requires quieting the body, emotions and thoughts simultaneously, leading to an integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dream-like imagery emanating from the temporal lobes.
John Curtis Gowan (1975) catalogued the entire spectrum of extraordinary phenomena related to trance, art, and creativity. In his taxonomy, he called these distinctive modes or domains of human dynamics Prototaxic (Trance), Parataxic (Art), and Syntaxic (Creativity).
Trance is characterized by loss of ego, art by emotionally charged (often symbolic) imagery, and in creativity meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically with ego present. In some ways, these modalities could represent the uncanniness of precognition, the imagery of clairvoyance, and the knowing of telepathy.
Trance is often associated with awe, dread, horror, and panic since ego control is weak or absent. These numinous effects are moderated in the artistic experience that comes as visualization, audialization, emotional inspiration, sensual, symbolic and mythopoetic imagery.
In terms of precognition, artists are often said to be perceptually "ahead of their time." Art is the transition phase in the relationship between the ego and the emergent transcendent function. Transcendence is a "quantum leap," a recurrent process, not a steady-state. It is a phase-transition moving toward illumination. The syntaxic experience of creativity is even more benign since the mind apprehends directly without ego dissociation. Psi experiences become more naturally integrated, regular, inspirational and uplifting while less frightening or awesome.
Gowan's work naturally included both hypnosis and ESP, which he cited as consciously or unconsciously operative at these various levels of dissociation, ego-involvement and levels of arousal (sympathetic and parasympathetic). Puharich (1961) found telepathic reception facilitated by parasympathetic activation, while sending the message was stronger with activation of the sympathetic, or adrenergic system.
For Gowan, the accessibility of certain psychic experiences depended on the mode of functioning. Intuitive self-knowledge is intrinsic to a wide variety of higher mental functions. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis are clearly linked to the primal trance, but can be applied in more integrated modes to enhance psi ability (Krippner, 1968).
The question becomes "How can we facilitate the emergence of psi phenomena, either for greater awareness or creativity?" Knowing what we know about psi expression, how can we train ourselves to encourage its emergence? Hypnosis or self-hypnosis simply helps engage the emotional mind, the imaginal mind, the biophysical mind rather than just approaching the task rationally and conceptually.
Unfortunately, the question of psi-facilitation was asked by covert forces during the Cold War, and much of the statistical and practical data on psi comes from those black-ops sources (CIA, KGB, NSA, DIA, DOD, U.S. Army and Navy). The Russians wanted to use psi for espionage and the US countered with its own team. Much of this government-sponsored work went on at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), by Puharich, Puthoff, Targ, and Swann. And the Eastcoast counterpart, Mankind Research Unlimited which had another psi ops team, including Milan Ryzl.
Human potential advocates, Jack Schwarz and Robert Monroe separately pursued independent, more explorative and mystical approaches. Both taught consciousness management techniques through forms of self-hypnosis. Schwarz, practicing as the Aleithea Foundation in Southern Oregon, focused on bioregulation with autohypnosis and subtle human energies.
Monroe's techniques employ neuroregulation with the frequency-following response (which he trademarked with the Monroe Institute in Virginia, as Hemi-Synch) to induce trance, entraining both hemispheres in alpha and theta (1982).
Hemi-Synch, also known as binaural beat technology, actively drives the modulation of electrocortical activity through resonance effects, changing levels of awareness and arousal, attentional focus, and cognitive content. Often combined with biofeedback, it helps shortcut processes that would take years of technologically unassisted yogic training.
Graywolf Swinney (2001), Dr. Stanley Krippner, and Iona Miller have conducted trainings in co-consciousness (Erickson, Rossi & Rossi, 1976) and theta training at Asklepia Foundation, also in Southern Oregon. A deep state of rapport is used in psychotherapeutic journey processes, employing shamanic hypnotherapeutic techniques. Theta is reportedly the psychic range of the mind, generated largely in the temporal lobes. Co-consciousness is a shared virtuality, a telepathic rapport wherein both participant's brainwaves become synchronized into a single holographic biofield (Miller and Swinney, 2000).
Spontaneous psi phenomena have been associated with theta waves by Krippner (1977), the Greens (1977), and more recently by Persinger (1987). Consciously producing theta requires quieting the body, emotions and thoughts simultaneously, leading to an integrative reverie, a deep focus of attention. Theta is often accompanied by hypnagogic or dream-like imagery emanating from the temporal lobes.
John Curtis Gowan (1975) catalogued the entire spectrum of extraordinary phenomena related to trance, art, and creativity. In his taxonomy, he called these distinctive modes or domains of human dynamics Prototaxic (Trance), Parataxic (Art), and Syntaxic (Creativity).
Trance is characterized by loss of ego, art by emotionally charged (often symbolic) imagery, and in creativity meaning is more or less fully cognized symbolically with ego present. In some ways, these modalities could represent the uncanniness of precognition, the imagery of clairvoyance, and the knowing of telepathy.
Trance is often associated with awe, dread, horror, and panic since ego control is weak or absent. These numinous effects are moderated in the artistic experience that comes as visualization, audialization, emotional inspiration, sensual, symbolic and mythopoetic imagery.
In terms of precognition, artists are often said to be perceptually "ahead of their time." Art is the transition phase in the relationship between the ego and the emergent transcendent function. Transcendence is a "quantum leap," a recurrent process, not a steady-state. It is a phase-transition moving toward illumination. The syntaxic experience of creativity is even more benign since the mind apprehends directly without ego dissociation. Psi experiences become more naturally integrated, regular, inspirational and uplifting while less frightening or awesome.
Gowan's work naturally included both hypnosis and ESP, which he cited as consciously or unconsciously operative at these various levels of dissociation, ego-involvement and levels of arousal (sympathetic and parasympathetic). Puharich (1961) found telepathic reception facilitated by parasympathetic activation, while sending the message was stronger with activation of the sympathetic, or adrenergic system.
For Gowan, the accessibility of certain psychic experiences depended on the mode of functioning. Intuitive self-knowledge is intrinsic to a wide variety of higher mental functions. Hypnosis and self-hypnosis are clearly linked to the primal trance, but can be applied in more integrated modes to enhance psi ability (Krippner, 1968).
Hypnosis & PSI
PSI DEEPLY: HYPNOSIS & ESP
In 1967, the Czech government tried to co-opt the allegedly successful psychical research and training program of biochemist Milan Ryzl. After screening many candidates, he found 50 high-scoring subjects, and they proceeded to win several rounds of the Czech lottery.
“Milan Ryzl, a chemist who defected to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1967, developed a hypnotic technique for facilitating ESP. . .Ryzl’s technique involved the intensive use of deep hypnosis sessions almost daily for a period of several months. The first stage of the sessions was to instill confidence in his subjects that they could visualize clear mental images containing accurate extrasensory information. Once this stage was reached, Ryzl concentrated on conducting simple ESP tests with immediate feedback so that subjects might learn to associate certain mental states with accurate psychic information. Subjects were taught to reject mental images which were fuzzy or unclear. This process, according to Ryzl, continued until the subject was able to perceive clairvoyantly with accuracy and detail. Finally, Ryzl attempted to wean the subject away from his own tutelage so that he or she could function independently. While still in Czechoslovakia, Ryzl claimed to have used this technique with some five hundred individuals, fifty of whom supposedly achieved success.
Other studies have shown heightened ESP in states of physical relaxation or in trance and hypnotic states. In fact, the use of hypnosis to produce high ESP scores is one of the most replicable procedures in psi research.” (Mishlove, 1975).
In 1967, the Czech government tried to co-opt the allegedly successful psychical research and training program of biochemist Milan Ryzl. After screening many candidates, he found 50 high-scoring subjects, and they proceeded to win several rounds of the Czech lottery.
“Milan Ryzl, a chemist who defected to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1967, developed a hypnotic technique for facilitating ESP. . .Ryzl’s technique involved the intensive use of deep hypnosis sessions almost daily for a period of several months. The first stage of the sessions was to instill confidence in his subjects that they could visualize clear mental images containing accurate extrasensory information. Once this stage was reached, Ryzl concentrated on conducting simple ESP tests with immediate feedback so that subjects might learn to associate certain mental states with accurate psychic information. Subjects were taught to reject mental images which were fuzzy or unclear. This process, according to Ryzl, continued until the subject was able to perceive clairvoyantly with accuracy and detail. Finally, Ryzl attempted to wean the subject away from his own tutelage so that he or she could function independently. While still in Czechoslovakia, Ryzl claimed to have used this technique with some five hundred individuals, fifty of whom supposedly achieved success.
Other studies have shown heightened ESP in states of physical relaxation or in trance and hypnotic states. In fact, the use of hypnosis to produce high ESP scores is one of the most replicable procedures in psi research.” (Mishlove, 1975).
WORLD’S FIRST PSYCHIC TOURNAMENT
In 1973, after hosting Ryzl for weeks in his Seattle home with many late-night discussions on the nature of psi, physicist and parapsychologist Richard Alan Miller created a model for anomalous cognition. Also drawing on his laboratory experience with biofeedback, he wrote a paper called “ESP Induction through Forms of Self Hypnosis.” In 1975, while never claiming to be a psychic, he got to put his theory to a rather unique test: the World’s First Psychic Tournament.
On September 21, 1975, Llewellyn Publications, noted occult publisher, sponsored this event in Minneapolis, Minnesota as part of their 5th Annual Gnosticon Festival. The tournament itself was co-sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Man, originally set up to continue the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine and his pioneering work in ESP at Duke University. Many famous psychics were invited, including such personalities as John Pierrakos and Sibyl Leek.
Richard Alan Miller was also invited to test the proposed models for inducing ESP ability using forms of self-hypnosis. Since he was relatively unknown for having any abilities in this ESP field, it seemed to hold some potential as a valid first study. More than 20 nationally known psychics also participated in this event.
The clairvoyance test consisted of twenty (20) cards randomly pulled from ten (10) poker decks. Each participant was to guess the suit of each card. With one chance in four of guessing the correct suit, the average score for a run of 20 cards with no ESP ability is 5. Each participant was given five (5) different runs. A final score determined the winner, with a total of 25 representing the norm.
What happened is now history: More than 50 percent of those participating showed normal scores ranging from 22 to 27 out of a possible 100, as would be expected in the general population. Most of the more well-known psychics showed some seemingly paranormal ability in clairvoyance, as expected, with total scores averaging between 8 and 12 correct answers out of 20. One well-known psychic even had a score as high as 61 out of a total possible 100.
Using the technique of ESP induction through forms of self-hypnosis as outlined in his paper, however, Miller did not have a run less than 16 out of 20. His total score was 83 out of 100. This was more than two orders of magnitude greater probability than scores of nationally recognized psychics. He took home a first place certificate as testament to his extraordinary performance. It still hangs on the wall in the office.
THE PSI FACTOR
Of course, this anecdotal evidence does not constitute scientific proof of this model. What it does represent, however, is a need to understand the true significance of self-hypnosis is and how it relates to extra-sensory perception. Something definitely made a difference in the experiment. How might this be applied to therapy? Or perhaps to such questions as the role of placebo, spontaneous healing based in the physically-transforming belief that you can do something beyond your normal scope.
Miller applied an ESP screening questionnaire that helps define the attitudes that facilitate psi. It was given to 500 college students and weighing factors were assigned to individual questions.
The bell-shaped curve developed from the survey indicated that helpful traits included a belief in ESP, extroversion, freedom from anxiety, easy or frequent dream recall, hypnotizability, and a relatively expressive personality. Memory, creativity, and visualization/association showed inconclusive results.
However, EEG parameters showed a highly significant positive correlation between directional alpha frequency shift and ESP scoring. More recent studies have shown an even greater correlation for theta brainwaves and psi faculty. There also seems to be a correlation between high ESP scores and number of reported psi experiences.
In its Stargate Project, SRI developed even more stringent criteria for what constitutes a viable remote viewer, based on statistical results. In their program, the level of arousal, according to McMoneagle as told to JNLRMI, didn’t seem to matter much. Whereas normal people are recommended to relax or use the progression relaxation that facilitates self-hypnosis, professional remote viewers can begin from a relaxed state and move to an excited one, or begin excited and become calmer.
On September 21, 1975, Llewellyn Publications, noted occult publisher, sponsored this event in Minneapolis, Minnesota as part of their 5th Annual Gnosticon Festival. The tournament itself was co-sponsored by the Foundation for the Study of Man, originally set up to continue the work of Dr. J. B. Rhine and his pioneering work in ESP at Duke University. Many famous psychics were invited, including such personalities as John Pierrakos and Sibyl Leek.
Richard Alan Miller was also invited to test the proposed models for inducing ESP ability using forms of self-hypnosis. Since he was relatively unknown for having any abilities in this ESP field, it seemed to hold some potential as a valid first study. More than 20 nationally known psychics also participated in this event.
The clairvoyance test consisted of twenty (20) cards randomly pulled from ten (10) poker decks. Each participant was to guess the suit of each card. With one chance in four of guessing the correct suit, the average score for a run of 20 cards with no ESP ability is 5. Each participant was given five (5) different runs. A final score determined the winner, with a total of 25 representing the norm.
What happened is now history: More than 50 percent of those participating showed normal scores ranging from 22 to 27 out of a possible 100, as would be expected in the general population. Most of the more well-known psychics showed some seemingly paranormal ability in clairvoyance, as expected, with total scores averaging between 8 and 12 correct answers out of 20. One well-known psychic even had a score as high as 61 out of a total possible 100.
Using the technique of ESP induction through forms of self-hypnosis as outlined in his paper, however, Miller did not have a run less than 16 out of 20. His total score was 83 out of 100. This was more than two orders of magnitude greater probability than scores of nationally recognized psychics. He took home a first place certificate as testament to his extraordinary performance. It still hangs on the wall in the office.
THE PSI FACTOR
Of course, this anecdotal evidence does not constitute scientific proof of this model. What it does represent, however, is a need to understand the true significance of self-hypnosis is and how it relates to extra-sensory perception. Something definitely made a difference in the experiment. How might this be applied to therapy? Or perhaps to such questions as the role of placebo, spontaneous healing based in the physically-transforming belief that you can do something beyond your normal scope.
Miller applied an ESP screening questionnaire that helps define the attitudes that facilitate psi. It was given to 500 college students and weighing factors were assigned to individual questions.
The bell-shaped curve developed from the survey indicated that helpful traits included a belief in ESP, extroversion, freedom from anxiety, easy or frequent dream recall, hypnotizability, and a relatively expressive personality. Memory, creativity, and visualization/association showed inconclusive results.
However, EEG parameters showed a highly significant positive correlation between directional alpha frequency shift and ESP scoring. More recent studies have shown an even greater correlation for theta brainwaves and psi faculty. There also seems to be a correlation between high ESP scores and number of reported psi experiences.
In its Stargate Project, SRI developed even more stringent criteria for what constitutes a viable remote viewer, based on statistical results. In their program, the level of arousal, according to McMoneagle as told to JNLRMI, didn’t seem to matter much. Whereas normal people are recommended to relax or use the progression relaxation that facilitates self-hypnosis, professional remote viewers can begin from a relaxed state and move to an excited one, or begin excited and become calmer.
HOW TO...
APPLYING RYZL'S METHOD
So, just how did Miller wind up beating the best psychics in the nation at their own game? And more importantly, how can you increase your Psi-Q? Miller applied Ryzl's definitions and postulates relating self-hypnosis and ESP, both a theory and a practice, combined with his own work in biofeedback.
The standard definitions used for hypnosis often call it a borderline state between sleeping and waking, i.e. body asleep, mind awake. Any state characterized by an intense concentration of attention in on area, accompanied by a profound lack of attention in other areas, may also be considered hypnosis. It opens us to our psychophysical impressions by limiting external input.
With this type of definition, everyone is considered to be continually in a light state of hypnosis, witness “white line fever” while driving, or the plea, “I was spaced-out.” Musicians call it “being in the groove,” others “sharing a wavelength.” Our social roles are also like trance states with their intrinsic patterns. When we go in public we wear the ‘armour” of our persona and immerse ourselves in that self-image.
Charisma is also a form of hypnosis akin to Mesmer’s original “animal magnetism.” Traumas also create trance states with automatic behaviors that can persist for years. The “scripts, games, and rackets”of Transactional Analysis can also be seen as trance states, where we habitually replay our typical ways of dealing with self, others, and world. So the question becomes not “if” one is hypnotized, but what kind of trance and its depth one is in at any given moment.
The depth of hypnosis, which is an implied issue in this definition, may be defined as the difference between the intensity of concentration in one sphere or area and the depth of inhibition in others. Attention focused in one area creates a corresponding lacuna, or lack of attention, in other areas of the brain. Centering the attention for prolonged periods, often with suggestions for further deepening, leads to deeper states of hypnosis. With these definitions, a useful model for relating hypnosis to psi phenomena is possible.
Psi Theory:
Postulate I: The conscious experience is associated with the nervous processes which take place above a certain critical level of awareness/alertness. This function, defined as I(c), varies considerably in a state of hypnosis, where attention is focused.
Postulate II: Psi Energy, arbitrarily defined as E(psi), is an equivalent in the field of extra-sensory phenomenon of what, in our three-dimensional world, is called energy.
Correlate A: E(psi) is not limited by time.
Correlate B: E(psi) can not be transformed into other energies (i.e. physical energies,; converting heat into light).
Correlate C: E(psi) operates by manipulating the transformation of physical energies.
Postulate III: Psi Energy, is responsible for extra-sensory perception and psycho-kinetic phenomenon (PK).
Postulate IV: Psi Energy is the product of some aspect of the metabolic processes. Physical data regarding the relationship between metabolic processes and extra-sensory perception can be found in Beyond Telepathy, by Andrija Puharich.
Postulate V: The generation of Psi Energy rapidly decreases the level of alertness. This immediately explains why:
(1) each conscious act has a limited duration,
(2) why we experience a permanent train of changing thoughts, and
(3) why our attention permanently shifts from one object to the next.
When you think, Psi Energy is created. The Psi Energy automatically decreases the level of alertness so that one shifts to something else.
Postulate VI: The intensity of conscious experience, I(c), depends on the time rate of the generation of psi Energy. Mathematically, this is described as dE(psi)/dt = A(e) x I(c).
The rate of change of E(psi) as a function of time is equal to some geographical constant, A(e), times the intensity of concentration, I(c). More simply stated Psi Energy is equal to a geographical constant times the intensity of concentration, I(c), times the amount of time that the thought is held. E(psi) = A(e) x I(c) x t
If we cannot make any particular thought last long enough, it should be sufficient to repeat it again and again until the value of the individual brief periods add up to a sufficient value.
Postulate VII: The formation of Psi Energy, which is created by a holistic psychophysical act, preserves the semantic control of the thought that created it. In essence, your thought is uniquely distinct. If you deviate from your thought slightly, it is a different thought-form, including the psychosomatic component. There is a tangible shift in the mind/body.
The Method:
(1). Formulate the question.
(2). Hold that thought for as long as possible.
(3). Assume that the event has occurred.
(4). Drop into a “blank mind” state and wait.
When questioning or desiring thoughts are intense enough, lasting long enough, or repeated frequently enough, psi is produced in sufficient intensity and structure to be detectable in the physical world. This may occur in hypnotic states, in states of intentionality, elated or traumatic emotions, or when interest, motivation, or desire is strongly increased.
The individual confronts the continuum with desire and prolonged concentration. The question being asked must be intense enough to impress itself on the unconscious. Lacking intensity, the signal will not be perceived. Intentionality strengthens the signal path.
Consciousness is then dropped into a “blank” state, an empty state, or “beginner’s mind.” The actual visualization is a switch from the concentrated point to the void. When this occurs the information is impressed on consciousness, resulting in a psychophysical perceptual event. This event is independent of both space and time.
Ordinarily when people spontaneously fall into trance states, they are generally not in a “blank mind” state of expectant emptiness. There is the chatter of subconscious thoughts going on even as the process deepens toward sleep. These thoughts are generated and go on automatically at a subliminal level, often without awareness.
Consequently, the information or signal path gets distorted, and weird patterns emerge, much like those experienced in dreams. In a waking dream, distorted signals may be perceived as “spirit guides”, automatic handwriting, or other autonomous related phenomena of trance states. We have seen earlier that Gowan characterized this loss of ego-awareness as the Prototaxic Mode.
Puharich believes reception is enhanced by “parasympathetic activation” in which there is an increase in released acetylcholine. He claims that telepathic sending of information is easier when there is an increased amount of adrenaline in the system. These metabolic processes are not “causal” but merely correlates of psi. Psi meaning comes through intense visual, auditory, and kinesthetic psychosensory experiences.
This “energized enthusiasm” can be seen in states of emotional involvement and artistic inspiration (Parataxic Mode), as well as creativity (Syntaxic Mode). Parataxic experience consists of relationships with multisensory images whose meaning remains on the symbolic level.
Syntaxic experiences occur when the consciously aware ego cooperates willingly with the subconscious forces. Here knowing and meaning are clearer and fully cognized with minimal distortion. Other higher forms of concentration include biofeedback, meditation, tantra, peak experiences, higher Jhana states of yoga, and so on. Concentration is intense, structured and prolonged.
Discussion:
ESP is often observed in hypnosis, a state characterized by a single intensive thought. Recurrent cases of psycho-kinetic phenomena, such as the haunted-house variety, are often reported to be connected with previous trauma or tragic events, associated with intensity of concentration, I(c).
The frequently reported cases of crisis telepathy, ESP contact between two persons, one of which is dying or in grave danger, are necessarily associated with intense thought or concentration, even obsession and a highly aroused state. The length of time experienced depends entirely upon the circumstances; in some cases there is subjective dilation of time perception.
The discovery of mental impregnation, known in the literature as psychometry suggests that repeated identical thoughts increase the expected psychic effect. Wearing a ring for a long time may “imprint” memory of the wearer onto the ring; just slipping a ring on and off and handing it to a psychometrist will not generally reveal any memory of the wearer.
Religious or spiritual traditions assert that repeated prayers may be more effective than single ones. In other words, the more you repeat the same prayer, or mantra, or the more you do a single ritual, the greater the effect. Along that line of reasoning, “tithing” might be seen as a factor of one’s time or attention, rather than money. Some meditation schools, for example, require no money but 10% of your daily time (2.5 hours) in meditation.
The stimulating action of psi formation on the brain may account for memory, more particularly, active recollection. The influence of psi formation increases the level of awareness of the neuro-patterns corresponding to the thought to be remembered. The synapses are flooded over and over with the same chemical messengers and electrical signals. The correlating psychosomatic content is consciously re-experienced.
DREAM TELEPATHY AND BEYOND
“In 1969, Charles Honorton and Stanley Krippner reviewed the experimental literature of studies designed to use hypnosis to induce ESP. Of nineteen experiments reported, only seven failed to produce significant results. Many of the studies produced astounding success. In a particularly interesting precognition study, conducted by Fahler and Osis with two hypnotized subjects, the task also included making confidence calls, or predicting which guesses would be most accurate. The correlation of confidence call hits produced impressive results with a probability of 0.0000002.” (Mishlove, 1975).
Krippner went on to conduct research in Dream Telepathy (1973) with Montague Ullman, following the lead of other Maimonides Hospital (Brooklyn, N.Y.) researchers, such as Frederick Myers. These experiments in nocturnal ESP are foundational and though never replicated, the results were highly suggestive of a strong psi correlation.
Their ten-year study concluded that dream reports can show the effect of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Their hypothesis was that ESP is more common during dreaming than waking and therefore an "agent" could more easily transfer the target thoughts or imagery to a sleeping subject, influencing their dreams.
Such prominent dream researchers as David Foulkes (Belvedere & Foulkes, 1971), Gordon Globus (Globus et al., 1968), Calvin Hall (1967), Robert Van de Castle (1971), and Keith Hearne (1987) attempted to repeat these findings. Because the replication rate from these other laboratories was inconsistent, the Maimonides team did not claim to have conclusively demonstrated that communication in dreams can sometimes transcend space and time. However, they did open a promising line of investigation.
Years later, Stanley Krippner and Michael Persinger, a Canadian neuroscientist, reviewed the entire body of dream research data from Maimonides Medical Center, selecting the first night that each subject in a telepathy experiment had visited the laboratory. They matched the results of these nights with geomagnetic data, discovering that the subjects' telepathy "hits" tended to be higher during calm nights than during nights marked by electrical storms and high sunspot activity (Persinger & Krippner, 1989).
Persinger (1974) has urged using reported psi phenomena in new and ingenious ways, observing, "Across cultures and throughout history people have been reporting psi- experiences. Let us find out what they are saying. . .It is by looking at the similarities of the verbal behavior that we may find enough consistencies to understand the factors responsible for the reports” (p. 13).
Persinger (e.g., Schaut & Persinger, 1985) has examined several collections of spontaneous cases, including the 35 gathered by Stevenson (1970), reporting that they seem to occur most frequently when geomagnetic activity is calmer than the days before or after the experience - - and lower than the month's average activity.
This approach can be applied to any collection of cases (e.g., Persinger & Krippner, 1989) where the date of the alleged experience has been recorded. If repeatable, these effects may help to provide an understanding of the mechanisms underlying psi phenomena, and may even indicate a potentially predictable pattern for such events.(Krippner)
Geomagnetic field perturbations have been reported to affect biological systems by other investigators (e.g., Subrahmanyam, Sanker Narayan, & Srinivasan, 1985). Persinger (1989) has proposed two interpretations of the geomagnetic field effect. The first is that psi is a geomagnetic field correlate; solar disturbances and consequent geomagnetic storms affect this correlate. The second is that the geomagnetic field affects brain receptivity to psi, which remains constant.
In the latter interpretation, psi is always present in space and time, waiting to be accessed by crisis, emotion, or by optimal laboratory stimulus parameters. Geomagnetic activity may affect the detection capacity of the brain for this information, especially the neural pathways that facilitate the consolidation and conscious access to this information. Without this geomagnetic activity, awareness of the psi stimulus might not be as likely and the brain's "latent reserve capacities" would not be utilized.
Taking this argument one step further, Persinger (1989) points out that deep temporal lobe activity exists in equilibrium with the global geomagnetic condition. When there is a sudden decrease in geomagnetic activity, there appears to be an enhancement of processes that facilitate psi reception, especially telepathy and clairvoyance.
Increases in geomagnetic activity may suppress pineal melatonin levels and contribute to reductions of cortical seizure thresholds. Indeed, melatonin is correlated with temporal lobe-related disorders such as depression and seizures. (Krippner)
CYBER PSI TRAINING
So what direction can we expect psi research to take in this new millennium? Clearly, the experimenters themselves want to follow a self-directed course rather than the mandates of a government-driven program. They would like access to private, academic, and government funds, with leading edge equipment: high-ticket brain monitoring equipment such as 90-channel EEG, fMRI, SPECT, and ERP. They would like to practice without a professional stigma attached to their pioneering work.
Several theories of psi have been put forth throughout the years. Psychologist Rex Stanford, altered-states expert Charles Tart, post-quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti, and psi researcher Charles Honorton, as well as physicist Helmut Schmidt have all developed models for ESP and precognition. Each embodies certain possible, even plausible factors. Some researchers worked with Eastern swamis and yogis to understand the mechanisms and induction techniques or evocation of this psychic power.
Quantum theory predits that empty space (the vacuum) contains an enormous amount of residual background energy known as zero-point energy (ZPE). Physicist David Bohm, biologist Rupert Sheldrake (researching psychic pets) with his morphogenetic fields, and Ervin Laszlo propose zero-point or vacuum potential mediation for psi. The superdense quantum vacuum may be a physically real field, including but not limited to gravitation and electromagnetism. Perhaps it can transmit psi.
However, they can’t provide any experimental protocols that might test such theories. Is psi a field or a quantum effect? Fields link phenomena in time as well as space. But, fields themselves cannot be observed; only the influences propagating through them.
Other theories suggest phase-conjugate pilot waves, scalar waves, virtual states, hyperfield flux, holographic hyperchannel effect, complementarity, even uncertainty. Biophysical theories for the paranormal bridge include Josephson junctions, microtubules, and liquid crystals as psi transducers.
Honorton and others long ago found defects in old psi testing techniques and addressed criticisms with new methodology. They eliminated variables like subconscious cueing by covering the subjects’eyes with split ping-pong balls and playing “white noise” into their ears.
Researchers hypothesized that this neutral field would function as a less-distracting “blank canvas” for psi hits. So it served a dual purpose of refining experimental procedure and minimizing distracting sensory input. These experiments, (known as Ganzfield tests), were replicated by many experimenters in many facilities, with encouragingly similar positive results. Other tests were conducted in sensory deprivation chambers and electrically-shielded Faraday cages.
Experimenter bias, the tendency to find what one seeks, is an occupational hazard, though skeptics have found positive psi correlations. But careful interpretations of models, artifacts, experimental method, instrumentation, randomization, target selection, statistical inference, sensory leakage, recording errors, and controls can’t be rigorous enough.
Proper scientific control for ESP research has been refined over the years, though cheating and frauds have plagued the field, and the niave scientist. One solution to this dilemma lately has been to experiment with the field-tested government Remote Viewers, who have established track records. They have their own reports of their subjective experiences, not the results of their missions, but the sensations that led to the observation or retrieval of those images.
Remote viewer Ingo Swann, called the father of RV, argues for the demystification of psi. Swann’s model supercedes the traditional psi paradigm and focuses on the hardware issues discussed in neurobiology and information theory.
Swann argues for systematic and deliberate development of this ability much like athletic training, as well as conceptual understanding. He prefers the term Distant Mental Interactions with Living Systems (DMILS) to ESP. He wants this capacity tested in the context of physical science as part of man’s natural spectrum of senses. He claims applying focus or attention on the perceptual apparatus with feedback on results “fine tunes” psi ability.
His concrete approach and insightful conclusions include his view of our sensory apparatus as a “transducer array” to convert information from one form to another. He calls his human “software” program a “mental information processing grid.” He simply converts various forms of input energy to another form his sensory system can “read.”
We do much the same when we interpret the electromagnetic signals that come through the air from a voice into meaning in our brains. He suggests we can develop the ability for several transducers of signals, depending on our exposure to the cognitive processing of these signals.
Targ claimed to see reasonably sharp and clear pictures. In remote viewing, if the mental picture doesn’t form, one is left with a mere “impression,” a less-precise signal. The signal is compared against memory to determine if it is meaningful to the task at hand, the target.
In other words, you can develop this ability through practice and feedback of the accuracy of your perceived signals. Pathways that work get reinforced. The process is very similar to psychophysical learning with biofeedback, such as alpha and theta training.
Swann argues for learning to fine tune one’s signal to noise ratio, learning to notice direct sensory data as well as imaginal signals, such as feelings, intuition, impressions. Repeated exposure and accurate feedback strengthens recognition of subtle and implicit relationships. Can cybernetic machines, such as random number generators, computers, and biofeedback devices help us hone psi faculties?
Swann emphasizes the difference between message and its structure. An experienced viewer can put together mental images from subtle cues. In RV, the signal appears as symbols, sounds, feelings, tastes, pictures, and holistic impressions. One learns to organize them based, again, on repeated feedback.
Misconceptions, fears, rigid concepts, body movement, excessive gastrointestinal activity, sleepiness, language categories, and other psychological “baggage” can be sources of confounding noise. Other blocks come from trying too hard, and distracting daydreaming or preoccupying thoughts. Telepathy, empathy or rapport, and charisma seem to be related and clearly come into play during therapeutic entrainment.
BIOPHYSICS OF PSI
Nothing is known about the physical mechanism of ESP, or anomalous cognition. No one knows what modulates performance. Even those who can demonstrate psi in the laboratory on demand, cannot account for signal nonlocality or distant interaction. The origins of the data are not revealed, only the conclusions with their level of resolution or accuracy. This is where the models of information theory and biophysics come into play.
Physicist Lian Sidorov proposes two working models for non-local communication and intent-mediated healing:
1). Direct transmission (entrainment) of specialized electromagnetic frequencies, observed primarily in proximal healing; and,
2). Distant healing and remote viewing/diagnosis, where the target’s electromagnetic profile is modulated from a distance via partial entanglement of subject-target.
He cites the research of Finnish physicst Matti Pitkanen as a model for “directed entanglement” between the subject and target, the magnetic sensory canvas hypothesis. Pitkanen conjectures that distance healing involves transfer of specific electromagnetic frequencies through quantum wormholes for near-instant transfer of information.
The transmission may trigger certain brain frequencies and psychophysical changes. Thus, amplification of the signal leads from quantum to macroscopic effects. Pitkanen suggests the brain is a sensory organ of our electromagnetic selves, and may be linked to planetary rhythms through Schumann Resonance.
In his model, the EM fields are not directly carried from sender to target. They are simultaneously generated at the two locations by a vacuum (geometrical) current. Therefore, they remain coherent while by passing the paradox of non-attenuation with distance. Neural processing and quantum events may interpenetrate.
This still doesn’t really account for origins of the data, but merely the transmission modes. Biophysics researchers are attempting to follow the signal back to its source. The research must be interfaced with current theories in the natural sciences. Then it can be considered empirical; the paradoxical anomaly can then be linked within the known framework of knowledge. Is there really a field, or field-like continua, capable of transmitting information beyond the recognized limits of time and space?
Laszlo (1996) suggests that the natural processes of complexity and chaos could amplify vacuum-level fluctuations into significant inputs to behavior, and that the brain, another chaotic system, could receive and amplify these signals which can penetrate into consciousness.
SHAVING WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s Razor is a principle applied in science that contends problems should be stated in basic terms, not making more assumptions than needed to choose the simplest of equivalent models. Many hypotheses are proposed, tested, and rejected. Their validity is debated exposing their flaws and underlying assumptions.
Additional relevant hypotheses and unrelated statements are weeded out. Experiments with the sensitivity reveal which yield the most accurate predictions. If two rival theories pass empirical tests, the simpler one must be preferred. When it comes to conspiracy theories, we apply Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
But before we can find answers, we have to ask the right questions. Once we ask the right questions, we often have all the information needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, in the case of psi, it may be that our understanding of physics is still too incomplete to solve the riddle.
Lian Sidorov, editor of Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions has posed many incisive questions:
How is information stored and retrieved nonlocally by consciousness?
This simple question contains the essence of all psi paradoxes, from spontaneous events like precognition and telepathy to carefully engineered processes like retro-psychokinesis.
How can one strengthen the signal line?
What is the significance of electromagnetic signatures detected at the target in remote conscious interactions?
What is the earliest physiological detector of psi information in the transduction pathway to conscious awareness?
What determines the direction of information flow in nonlocal interactions; for example, between healer and patient?
What are the technical requirements of an experimental program and how do we develop the most suitable types of equipment to detect such effects?
Sidorov (2003) summarizes his discussion with expert remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle:
“What you are saying seems to be that: 1. everything you will ever know is already contained in your universe, although not necessarily accessible to your conscious mind, that comes with the effort involved in RV, or is revealed spontaneously as in “precognitive” 2. “when” a given target event takes place relative to the experimental present is irrelevant, because all the information is already available; 3. other people’s expectation and feedback should not affect your results, as long you are careful to task yourself in a way which does not include those elements. 4. “Making contact” with the target is more like flipping to the right page in your book than reaching anything in space and time.”
Are there preferred pathways for the signals in psi phenomena, windows of psi “sensitivity”? How specifically is the target recognized? How does one modulate and target “intent”? How does the signal rise above the threshold of awareness?
Mental intent seems to create cognitive bridges between subject and object, operator and target. We can also learn to recognize certain psychophysical patterns in ourselves through feedback. The physical and the psychical are inseparable. There appears to be an energetic/informational component, perhaps based in EM frequencies and holographic interference patterns. Holographic processes do occur in nature, including holographic information storage. The holographic field is a physical reality composed of interference waves.
In Scientific American (Aug. 2003), Bekenstein poses the question “Are you a hologram?” and states quantum physics says the entire universe might be. Can a somatic EM hologram possibly amplify as little as one quantum of energy into an effective signal? Are there holographic hyperchannels? Information in a field is holographic and the propagation of holographic interference patterns is quasi-instantaneous. Every part of the field contains the whole informational content, just in lower resolution.
“Each particle of mass in our bodies represents one closure of the entire universe yielding a holographic reality and deeper communication with ourselves is identical to communication with the universe, including any part of it, at any distance. Furthermore, in hyperspace the future and the past are all present. Since a particle does indeed exhibit a four-dimensional component for 1/137 of the time, each particle does connect to the future and to the past. With selective tuning and kindling any part of this holographic reality is accessible. However, because of the smallness of a single selective signal in the midst of the totality, the channel is quite noisy. For this reason skilled psychics,persons who have been found to have a greater fidelity for selective tuning, can be expected to produce better results than the normal person.” (Bearden, 1988).
Entanglement seems to occur somehow between all participants of a given intentional set-up. We have no idea how the non-local factor of target specificity is accomplished, other than intent and training. Do subject and target share a unified holographic field? Are standing waves picked up and carried by the Schumann Resonance, or transmitted by scalar waves or a gradient in the vacuum potential? Are the brains entrained on a resonant frequency? Does DNA function as a multi-mode antenna regulating growth, evolution, and perhaps psi?
Are specific interference patterns in the brain decoded and amplified? Ambient ELF fields and human bioreceptors, such as liquid crystals and piezoelectric crystal calcifications, have been suggested.
How we can increase our sensitivity is yet another question. The signal is perceived against a transient background of chaotic noise, and amplified by the body’s physiological pathways. Desire, intense concentration, and spiritual focus have been suggested. The trance state has been proposed as restricting the amount of input while allowing access to subtle perceptions.
Mind is a dynamic function of the entire organism at all levels of self-organization. Constantly fluctuating local parameters are embodied and amplified through the body’s electromagnetic control hologram. Mind/body modulates our sensitivity to external and internal information. Researchers measure a brainwave known as Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) to measure anticipation, anticipatory strategies, or readiness to respond; this stimulus can be informative or uninformative, carry content or just be an alert.
Remote viewing requires super-sensitivity and super-efficient states. It is not the result of cognitive training, but a gradual remolding of the entire psychophysical structure and metabolic pathways. Thus, the mind/body becomes a highly coherent, information-transparent transducer.
Vast information resources are hidden in unexplored manifolds of the mind/body continuum. In psi research, the study of nature and our nature, our potential, becomes entwined. As Einstein (1934, The World As I See It) said, “We are seeking for the simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together the observed facts.”
So, just how did Miller wind up beating the best psychics in the nation at their own game? And more importantly, how can you increase your Psi-Q? Miller applied Ryzl's definitions and postulates relating self-hypnosis and ESP, both a theory and a practice, combined with his own work in biofeedback.
The standard definitions used for hypnosis often call it a borderline state between sleeping and waking, i.e. body asleep, mind awake. Any state characterized by an intense concentration of attention in on area, accompanied by a profound lack of attention in other areas, may also be considered hypnosis. It opens us to our psychophysical impressions by limiting external input.
With this type of definition, everyone is considered to be continually in a light state of hypnosis, witness “white line fever” while driving, or the plea, “I was spaced-out.” Musicians call it “being in the groove,” others “sharing a wavelength.” Our social roles are also like trance states with their intrinsic patterns. When we go in public we wear the ‘armour” of our persona and immerse ourselves in that self-image.
Charisma is also a form of hypnosis akin to Mesmer’s original “animal magnetism.” Traumas also create trance states with automatic behaviors that can persist for years. The “scripts, games, and rackets”of Transactional Analysis can also be seen as trance states, where we habitually replay our typical ways of dealing with self, others, and world. So the question becomes not “if” one is hypnotized, but what kind of trance and its depth one is in at any given moment.
The depth of hypnosis, which is an implied issue in this definition, may be defined as the difference between the intensity of concentration in one sphere or area and the depth of inhibition in others. Attention focused in one area creates a corresponding lacuna, or lack of attention, in other areas of the brain. Centering the attention for prolonged periods, often with suggestions for further deepening, leads to deeper states of hypnosis. With these definitions, a useful model for relating hypnosis to psi phenomena is possible.
Psi Theory:
Postulate I: The conscious experience is associated with the nervous processes which take place above a certain critical level of awareness/alertness. This function, defined as I(c), varies considerably in a state of hypnosis, where attention is focused.
Postulate II: Psi Energy, arbitrarily defined as E(psi), is an equivalent in the field of extra-sensory phenomenon of what, in our three-dimensional world, is called energy.
Correlate A: E(psi) is not limited by time.
Correlate B: E(psi) can not be transformed into other energies (i.e. physical energies,; converting heat into light).
Correlate C: E(psi) operates by manipulating the transformation of physical energies.
Postulate III: Psi Energy, is responsible for extra-sensory perception and psycho-kinetic phenomenon (PK).
Postulate IV: Psi Energy is the product of some aspect of the metabolic processes. Physical data regarding the relationship between metabolic processes and extra-sensory perception can be found in Beyond Telepathy, by Andrija Puharich.
Postulate V: The generation of Psi Energy rapidly decreases the level of alertness. This immediately explains why:
(1) each conscious act has a limited duration,
(2) why we experience a permanent train of changing thoughts, and
(3) why our attention permanently shifts from one object to the next.
When you think, Psi Energy is created. The Psi Energy automatically decreases the level of alertness so that one shifts to something else.
Postulate VI: The intensity of conscious experience, I(c), depends on the time rate of the generation of psi Energy. Mathematically, this is described as dE(psi)/dt = A(e) x I(c).
The rate of change of E(psi) as a function of time is equal to some geographical constant, A(e), times the intensity of concentration, I(c). More simply stated Psi Energy is equal to a geographical constant times the intensity of concentration, I(c), times the amount of time that the thought is held. E(psi) = A(e) x I(c) x t
If we cannot make any particular thought last long enough, it should be sufficient to repeat it again and again until the value of the individual brief periods add up to a sufficient value.
Postulate VII: The formation of Psi Energy, which is created by a holistic psychophysical act, preserves the semantic control of the thought that created it. In essence, your thought is uniquely distinct. If you deviate from your thought slightly, it is a different thought-form, including the psychosomatic component. There is a tangible shift in the mind/body.
The Method:
(1). Formulate the question.
(2). Hold that thought for as long as possible.
(3). Assume that the event has occurred.
(4). Drop into a “blank mind” state and wait.
When questioning or desiring thoughts are intense enough, lasting long enough, or repeated frequently enough, psi is produced in sufficient intensity and structure to be detectable in the physical world. This may occur in hypnotic states, in states of intentionality, elated or traumatic emotions, or when interest, motivation, or desire is strongly increased.
The individual confronts the continuum with desire and prolonged concentration. The question being asked must be intense enough to impress itself on the unconscious. Lacking intensity, the signal will not be perceived. Intentionality strengthens the signal path.
Consciousness is then dropped into a “blank” state, an empty state, or “beginner’s mind.” The actual visualization is a switch from the concentrated point to the void. When this occurs the information is impressed on consciousness, resulting in a psychophysical perceptual event. This event is independent of both space and time.
Ordinarily when people spontaneously fall into trance states, they are generally not in a “blank mind” state of expectant emptiness. There is the chatter of subconscious thoughts going on even as the process deepens toward sleep. These thoughts are generated and go on automatically at a subliminal level, often without awareness.
Consequently, the information or signal path gets distorted, and weird patterns emerge, much like those experienced in dreams. In a waking dream, distorted signals may be perceived as “spirit guides”, automatic handwriting, or other autonomous related phenomena of trance states. We have seen earlier that Gowan characterized this loss of ego-awareness as the Prototaxic Mode.
Puharich believes reception is enhanced by “parasympathetic activation” in which there is an increase in released acetylcholine. He claims that telepathic sending of information is easier when there is an increased amount of adrenaline in the system. These metabolic processes are not “causal” but merely correlates of psi. Psi meaning comes through intense visual, auditory, and kinesthetic psychosensory experiences.
This “energized enthusiasm” can be seen in states of emotional involvement and artistic inspiration (Parataxic Mode), as well as creativity (Syntaxic Mode). Parataxic experience consists of relationships with multisensory images whose meaning remains on the symbolic level.
Syntaxic experiences occur when the consciously aware ego cooperates willingly with the subconscious forces. Here knowing and meaning are clearer and fully cognized with minimal distortion. Other higher forms of concentration include biofeedback, meditation, tantra, peak experiences, higher Jhana states of yoga, and so on. Concentration is intense, structured and prolonged.
Discussion:
ESP is often observed in hypnosis, a state characterized by a single intensive thought. Recurrent cases of psycho-kinetic phenomena, such as the haunted-house variety, are often reported to be connected with previous trauma or tragic events, associated with intensity of concentration, I(c).
The frequently reported cases of crisis telepathy, ESP contact between two persons, one of which is dying or in grave danger, are necessarily associated with intense thought or concentration, even obsession and a highly aroused state. The length of time experienced depends entirely upon the circumstances; in some cases there is subjective dilation of time perception.
The discovery of mental impregnation, known in the literature as psychometry suggests that repeated identical thoughts increase the expected psychic effect. Wearing a ring for a long time may “imprint” memory of the wearer onto the ring; just slipping a ring on and off and handing it to a psychometrist will not generally reveal any memory of the wearer.
Religious or spiritual traditions assert that repeated prayers may be more effective than single ones. In other words, the more you repeat the same prayer, or mantra, or the more you do a single ritual, the greater the effect. Along that line of reasoning, “tithing” might be seen as a factor of one’s time or attention, rather than money. Some meditation schools, for example, require no money but 10% of your daily time (2.5 hours) in meditation.
The stimulating action of psi formation on the brain may account for memory, more particularly, active recollection. The influence of psi formation increases the level of awareness of the neuro-patterns corresponding to the thought to be remembered. The synapses are flooded over and over with the same chemical messengers and electrical signals. The correlating psychosomatic content is consciously re-experienced.
DREAM TELEPATHY AND BEYOND
“In 1969, Charles Honorton and Stanley Krippner reviewed the experimental literature of studies designed to use hypnosis to induce ESP. Of nineteen experiments reported, only seven failed to produce significant results. Many of the studies produced astounding success. In a particularly interesting precognition study, conducted by Fahler and Osis with two hypnotized subjects, the task also included making confidence calls, or predicting which guesses would be most accurate. The correlation of confidence call hits produced impressive results with a probability of 0.0000002.” (Mishlove, 1975).
Krippner went on to conduct research in Dream Telepathy (1973) with Montague Ullman, following the lead of other Maimonides Hospital (Brooklyn, N.Y.) researchers, such as Frederick Myers. These experiments in nocturnal ESP are foundational and though never replicated, the results were highly suggestive of a strong psi correlation.
Their ten-year study concluded that dream reports can show the effect of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Their hypothesis was that ESP is more common during dreaming than waking and therefore an "agent" could more easily transfer the target thoughts or imagery to a sleeping subject, influencing their dreams.
Such prominent dream researchers as David Foulkes (Belvedere & Foulkes, 1971), Gordon Globus (Globus et al., 1968), Calvin Hall (1967), Robert Van de Castle (1971), and Keith Hearne (1987) attempted to repeat these findings. Because the replication rate from these other laboratories was inconsistent, the Maimonides team did not claim to have conclusively demonstrated that communication in dreams can sometimes transcend space and time. However, they did open a promising line of investigation.
Years later, Stanley Krippner and Michael Persinger, a Canadian neuroscientist, reviewed the entire body of dream research data from Maimonides Medical Center, selecting the first night that each subject in a telepathy experiment had visited the laboratory. They matched the results of these nights with geomagnetic data, discovering that the subjects' telepathy "hits" tended to be higher during calm nights than during nights marked by electrical storms and high sunspot activity (Persinger & Krippner, 1989).
Persinger (1974) has urged using reported psi phenomena in new and ingenious ways, observing, "Across cultures and throughout history people have been reporting psi- experiences. Let us find out what they are saying. . .It is by looking at the similarities of the verbal behavior that we may find enough consistencies to understand the factors responsible for the reports” (p. 13).
Persinger (e.g., Schaut & Persinger, 1985) has examined several collections of spontaneous cases, including the 35 gathered by Stevenson (1970), reporting that they seem to occur most frequently when geomagnetic activity is calmer than the days before or after the experience - - and lower than the month's average activity.
This approach can be applied to any collection of cases (e.g., Persinger & Krippner, 1989) where the date of the alleged experience has been recorded. If repeatable, these effects may help to provide an understanding of the mechanisms underlying psi phenomena, and may even indicate a potentially predictable pattern for such events.(Krippner)
Geomagnetic field perturbations have been reported to affect biological systems by other investigators (e.g., Subrahmanyam, Sanker Narayan, & Srinivasan, 1985). Persinger (1989) has proposed two interpretations of the geomagnetic field effect. The first is that psi is a geomagnetic field correlate; solar disturbances and consequent geomagnetic storms affect this correlate. The second is that the geomagnetic field affects brain receptivity to psi, which remains constant.
In the latter interpretation, psi is always present in space and time, waiting to be accessed by crisis, emotion, or by optimal laboratory stimulus parameters. Geomagnetic activity may affect the detection capacity of the brain for this information, especially the neural pathways that facilitate the consolidation and conscious access to this information. Without this geomagnetic activity, awareness of the psi stimulus might not be as likely and the brain's "latent reserve capacities" would not be utilized.
Taking this argument one step further, Persinger (1989) points out that deep temporal lobe activity exists in equilibrium with the global geomagnetic condition. When there is a sudden decrease in geomagnetic activity, there appears to be an enhancement of processes that facilitate psi reception, especially telepathy and clairvoyance.
Increases in geomagnetic activity may suppress pineal melatonin levels and contribute to reductions of cortical seizure thresholds. Indeed, melatonin is correlated with temporal lobe-related disorders such as depression and seizures. (Krippner)
CYBER PSI TRAINING
So what direction can we expect psi research to take in this new millennium? Clearly, the experimenters themselves want to follow a self-directed course rather than the mandates of a government-driven program. They would like access to private, academic, and government funds, with leading edge equipment: high-ticket brain monitoring equipment such as 90-channel EEG, fMRI, SPECT, and ERP. They would like to practice without a professional stigma attached to their pioneering work.
Several theories of psi have been put forth throughout the years. Psychologist Rex Stanford, altered-states expert Charles Tart, post-quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti, and psi researcher Charles Honorton, as well as physicist Helmut Schmidt have all developed models for ESP and precognition. Each embodies certain possible, even plausible factors. Some researchers worked with Eastern swamis and yogis to understand the mechanisms and induction techniques or evocation of this psychic power.
Quantum theory predits that empty space (the vacuum) contains an enormous amount of residual background energy known as zero-point energy (ZPE). Physicist David Bohm, biologist Rupert Sheldrake (researching psychic pets) with his morphogenetic fields, and Ervin Laszlo propose zero-point or vacuum potential mediation for psi. The superdense quantum vacuum may be a physically real field, including but not limited to gravitation and electromagnetism. Perhaps it can transmit psi.
However, they can’t provide any experimental protocols that might test such theories. Is psi a field or a quantum effect? Fields link phenomena in time as well as space. But, fields themselves cannot be observed; only the influences propagating through them.
Other theories suggest phase-conjugate pilot waves, scalar waves, virtual states, hyperfield flux, holographic hyperchannel effect, complementarity, even uncertainty. Biophysical theories for the paranormal bridge include Josephson junctions, microtubules, and liquid crystals as psi transducers.
Honorton and others long ago found defects in old psi testing techniques and addressed criticisms with new methodology. They eliminated variables like subconscious cueing by covering the subjects’eyes with split ping-pong balls and playing “white noise” into their ears.
Researchers hypothesized that this neutral field would function as a less-distracting “blank canvas” for psi hits. So it served a dual purpose of refining experimental procedure and minimizing distracting sensory input. These experiments, (known as Ganzfield tests), were replicated by many experimenters in many facilities, with encouragingly similar positive results. Other tests were conducted in sensory deprivation chambers and electrically-shielded Faraday cages.
Experimenter bias, the tendency to find what one seeks, is an occupational hazard, though skeptics have found positive psi correlations. But careful interpretations of models, artifacts, experimental method, instrumentation, randomization, target selection, statistical inference, sensory leakage, recording errors, and controls can’t be rigorous enough.
Proper scientific control for ESP research has been refined over the years, though cheating and frauds have plagued the field, and the niave scientist. One solution to this dilemma lately has been to experiment with the field-tested government Remote Viewers, who have established track records. They have their own reports of their subjective experiences, not the results of their missions, but the sensations that led to the observation or retrieval of those images.
Remote viewer Ingo Swann, called the father of RV, argues for the demystification of psi. Swann’s model supercedes the traditional psi paradigm and focuses on the hardware issues discussed in neurobiology and information theory.
Swann argues for systematic and deliberate development of this ability much like athletic training, as well as conceptual understanding. He prefers the term Distant Mental Interactions with Living Systems (DMILS) to ESP. He wants this capacity tested in the context of physical science as part of man’s natural spectrum of senses. He claims applying focus or attention on the perceptual apparatus with feedback on results “fine tunes” psi ability.
His concrete approach and insightful conclusions include his view of our sensory apparatus as a “transducer array” to convert information from one form to another. He calls his human “software” program a “mental information processing grid.” He simply converts various forms of input energy to another form his sensory system can “read.”
We do much the same when we interpret the electromagnetic signals that come through the air from a voice into meaning in our brains. He suggests we can develop the ability for several transducers of signals, depending on our exposure to the cognitive processing of these signals.
Targ claimed to see reasonably sharp and clear pictures. In remote viewing, if the mental picture doesn’t form, one is left with a mere “impression,” a less-precise signal. The signal is compared against memory to determine if it is meaningful to the task at hand, the target.
In other words, you can develop this ability through practice and feedback of the accuracy of your perceived signals. Pathways that work get reinforced. The process is very similar to psychophysical learning with biofeedback, such as alpha and theta training.
Swann argues for learning to fine tune one’s signal to noise ratio, learning to notice direct sensory data as well as imaginal signals, such as feelings, intuition, impressions. Repeated exposure and accurate feedback strengthens recognition of subtle and implicit relationships. Can cybernetic machines, such as random number generators, computers, and biofeedback devices help us hone psi faculties?
Swann emphasizes the difference between message and its structure. An experienced viewer can put together mental images from subtle cues. In RV, the signal appears as symbols, sounds, feelings, tastes, pictures, and holistic impressions. One learns to organize them based, again, on repeated feedback.
Misconceptions, fears, rigid concepts, body movement, excessive gastrointestinal activity, sleepiness, language categories, and other psychological “baggage” can be sources of confounding noise. Other blocks come from trying too hard, and distracting daydreaming or preoccupying thoughts. Telepathy, empathy or rapport, and charisma seem to be related and clearly come into play during therapeutic entrainment.
BIOPHYSICS OF PSI
Nothing is known about the physical mechanism of ESP, or anomalous cognition. No one knows what modulates performance. Even those who can demonstrate psi in the laboratory on demand, cannot account for signal nonlocality or distant interaction. The origins of the data are not revealed, only the conclusions with their level of resolution or accuracy. This is where the models of information theory and biophysics come into play.
Physicist Lian Sidorov proposes two working models for non-local communication and intent-mediated healing:
1). Direct transmission (entrainment) of specialized electromagnetic frequencies, observed primarily in proximal healing; and,
2). Distant healing and remote viewing/diagnosis, where the target’s electromagnetic profile is modulated from a distance via partial entanglement of subject-target.
He cites the research of Finnish physicst Matti Pitkanen as a model for “directed entanglement” between the subject and target, the magnetic sensory canvas hypothesis. Pitkanen conjectures that distance healing involves transfer of specific electromagnetic frequencies through quantum wormholes for near-instant transfer of information.
The transmission may trigger certain brain frequencies and psychophysical changes. Thus, amplification of the signal leads from quantum to macroscopic effects. Pitkanen suggests the brain is a sensory organ of our electromagnetic selves, and may be linked to planetary rhythms through Schumann Resonance.
In his model, the EM fields are not directly carried from sender to target. They are simultaneously generated at the two locations by a vacuum (geometrical) current. Therefore, they remain coherent while by passing the paradox of non-attenuation with distance. Neural processing and quantum events may interpenetrate.
This still doesn’t really account for origins of the data, but merely the transmission modes. Biophysics researchers are attempting to follow the signal back to its source. The research must be interfaced with current theories in the natural sciences. Then it can be considered empirical; the paradoxical anomaly can then be linked within the known framework of knowledge. Is there really a field, or field-like continua, capable of transmitting information beyond the recognized limits of time and space?
Laszlo (1996) suggests that the natural processes of complexity and chaos could amplify vacuum-level fluctuations into significant inputs to behavior, and that the brain, another chaotic system, could receive and amplify these signals which can penetrate into consciousness.
SHAVING WITH OCCAM’S RAZOR
Occam’s Razor is a principle applied in science that contends problems should be stated in basic terms, not making more assumptions than needed to choose the simplest of equivalent models. Many hypotheses are proposed, tested, and rejected. Their validity is debated exposing their flaws and underlying assumptions.
Additional relevant hypotheses and unrelated statements are weeded out. Experiments with the sensitivity reveal which yield the most accurate predictions. If two rival theories pass empirical tests, the simpler one must be preferred. When it comes to conspiracy theories, we apply Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
But before we can find answers, we have to ask the right questions. Once we ask the right questions, we often have all the information needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, in the case of psi, it may be that our understanding of physics is still too incomplete to solve the riddle.
Lian Sidorov, editor of Journal of Non-Locality and Remote Mental Interactions has posed many incisive questions:
How is information stored and retrieved nonlocally by consciousness?
This simple question contains the essence of all psi paradoxes, from spontaneous events like precognition and telepathy to carefully engineered processes like retro-psychokinesis.
How can one strengthen the signal line?
What is the significance of electromagnetic signatures detected at the target in remote conscious interactions?
What is the earliest physiological detector of psi information in the transduction pathway to conscious awareness?
What determines the direction of information flow in nonlocal interactions; for example, between healer and patient?
What are the technical requirements of an experimental program and how do we develop the most suitable types of equipment to detect such effects?
Sidorov (2003) summarizes his discussion with expert remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle:
“What you are saying seems to be that: 1. everything you will ever know is already contained in your universe, although not necessarily accessible to your conscious mind, that comes with the effort involved in RV, or is revealed spontaneously as in “precognitive” 2. “when” a given target event takes place relative to the experimental present is irrelevant, because all the information is already available; 3. other people’s expectation and feedback should not affect your results, as long you are careful to task yourself in a way which does not include those elements. 4. “Making contact” with the target is more like flipping to the right page in your book than reaching anything in space and time.”
Are there preferred pathways for the signals in psi phenomena, windows of psi “sensitivity”? How specifically is the target recognized? How does one modulate and target “intent”? How does the signal rise above the threshold of awareness?
Mental intent seems to create cognitive bridges between subject and object, operator and target. We can also learn to recognize certain psychophysical patterns in ourselves through feedback. The physical and the psychical are inseparable. There appears to be an energetic/informational component, perhaps based in EM frequencies and holographic interference patterns. Holographic processes do occur in nature, including holographic information storage. The holographic field is a physical reality composed of interference waves.
In Scientific American (Aug. 2003), Bekenstein poses the question “Are you a hologram?” and states quantum physics says the entire universe might be. Can a somatic EM hologram possibly amplify as little as one quantum of energy into an effective signal? Are there holographic hyperchannels? Information in a field is holographic and the propagation of holographic interference patterns is quasi-instantaneous. Every part of the field contains the whole informational content, just in lower resolution.
“Each particle of mass in our bodies represents one closure of the entire universe yielding a holographic reality and deeper communication with ourselves is identical to communication with the universe, including any part of it, at any distance. Furthermore, in hyperspace the future and the past are all present. Since a particle does indeed exhibit a four-dimensional component for 1/137 of the time, each particle does connect to the future and to the past. With selective tuning and kindling any part of this holographic reality is accessible. However, because of the smallness of a single selective signal in the midst of the totality, the channel is quite noisy. For this reason skilled psychics,persons who have been found to have a greater fidelity for selective tuning, can be expected to produce better results than the normal person.” (Bearden, 1988).
Entanglement seems to occur somehow between all participants of a given intentional set-up. We have no idea how the non-local factor of target specificity is accomplished, other than intent and training. Do subject and target share a unified holographic field? Are standing waves picked up and carried by the Schumann Resonance, or transmitted by scalar waves or a gradient in the vacuum potential? Are the brains entrained on a resonant frequency? Does DNA function as a multi-mode antenna regulating growth, evolution, and perhaps psi?
Are specific interference patterns in the brain decoded and amplified? Ambient ELF fields and human bioreceptors, such as liquid crystals and piezoelectric crystal calcifications, have been suggested.
How we can increase our sensitivity is yet another question. The signal is perceived against a transient background of chaotic noise, and amplified by the body’s physiological pathways. Desire, intense concentration, and spiritual focus have been suggested. The trance state has been proposed as restricting the amount of input while allowing access to subtle perceptions.
Mind is a dynamic function of the entire organism at all levels of self-organization. Constantly fluctuating local parameters are embodied and amplified through the body’s electromagnetic control hologram. Mind/body modulates our sensitivity to external and internal information. Researchers measure a brainwave known as Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) to measure anticipation, anticipatory strategies, or readiness to respond; this stimulus can be informative or uninformative, carry content or just be an alert.
Remote viewing requires super-sensitivity and super-efficient states. It is not the result of cognitive training, but a gradual remolding of the entire psychophysical structure and metabolic pathways. Thus, the mind/body becomes a highly coherent, information-transparent transducer.
Vast information resources are hidden in unexplored manifolds of the mind/body continuum. In psi research, the study of nature and our nature, our potential, becomes entwined. As Einstein (1934, The World As I See It) said, “We are seeking for the simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together the observed facts.”
References
Beckenstein, Jacob (2003), “Information in the Holographic Universe”, SciAm, Aug. 03. pp. 58-65.
Bearden, Thomas E. (1988). Excalibur Briefing: Explaining Paranormal Phenomena. San Francisco: Strawberry Hill Press.
Erickson, Milton H. and Ernest L. Rossi & Sheila Rossi (1976). Hypnotic Realities, New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.
Gowan, John Curtis (1974). Development of the Psychedelic Individual, privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Northridge, California.
Gowan, John Curtis (1975). Trance, Art, and Creativity, privately printed for the Creative Education Foundation, Buffalo, New York. http://www.csun.edu/edpsy/Gowan
Green, Elmer and Alyce (1977). Beyond Biofeedback, San Francisco: Delacorte Press.
Honorton, Charles (1967). "Creativity and precognitive scoring level," Psych. Abs. 41:08057.
Honorton, Charles (1969), "A combination of techniques for separation of high and low-scoring ESP subjects," Psych. Abs. 43:08881, 1969.
Krippner, Stanley (1968), "An experimental study in hypnosis and telepathy," Am. J. of Clinical Hypnosis, 11(1): 45-54.
Krippner, Stanley, “Psi Research and the Human Brain’s ‘Reserve Capacities’”, DynaPsych.
Krippner, Stanley (Ed.), Advances in Parapsychological Research, Vol. I and Vol. II.
Laszlo, Ervin (1996). "Subtle Connectins: Psi, Grof, Jung, and the Quantum Vacuum”; DynaPsych.
Laszlo, Ervin (1994). “Toward a Physical Foundation for Psi Phenomena.” J. B. Rhine Lecture. American Parapsychological Assn., Amsterdam, August 8, 1994.
Masters, R. and Jean Houston (1966). The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston.
Miller, R.A., Webb, B. Dickson, D. (1975), “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” Psychoenergetic Systems Journal Vol. 1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain. Later reprinted in the hardback book Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, editor. 1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris. And in the journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 5, 1992. 93-111. Boynton Beach, FL, Tom Lyttle, Editor.
Miller, R. A., Webb. B., “Embryonic Holography,” Psychoenergetic Systems, Stanley Krippner, Ed. Presented at the Omniversal Symposium, California State College at Sonoma, Saturday, September 29, 1973. Reprinted in Lyttle's journal Psychedelic Monographs and Essays, Vol. 6, 1993. 137-156.
Miller, Richard Alan (1985), The Magical and Ritual Use of Aphrodisiacs, New York, NY: Destiny Books.
Miller, Iona and Graywolf Swinney (2000). "CRP and Theta Reverie," Chaosophy 2000, Wilderville, Oregon: Institute for Consciousness Studies and Technologies. http://chaosophy.50megs.com
Mishlove, Jeffrey (1975, 1993), The Roots of Consciousness, Tulsa: Council Oak Books.
Monroe, Robert (1971), Journeys Out of the Body, New York: Doubleday.
Monroe, Robert (1982). “The Hemi-Synch Process”, Unpublished, Monroe Institute.
Motoyama, Hiroshi with Rande Brown, Science and the Evolution of Consciousness: Chakras, Ki and Psi.
Pang, Henry and L. Fort (1967), "Relatedness of Creativity, . . .and ESP," Perceptual and Motor Skills, 24: 650.
Persinger, Michael A. (1989), "Psi Phenomena and Temporal Lobe Activity: The Geomagnetic Factor," in I.A. Henkel and R. E. Berger (eds.) Research in Parapsychology 1988, Metuchen, NJ: Scarcrow Press.
Persinger M.A., & Krippner S. (1989). Dream ESP experiments and geomagnetic activity. Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research, 83, 101- 106.
Pitkanin, Matti, JNLRMI, Vol. 1, No. 1. http://emergentmind.org
Puharich, Andrija (1961), Beyond Telepathy. New York: Doubleday.Radin, Dean (1997). The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New York: Harper & Collins.
Radin, Dean and Bierman, Dick. “Anomalous unconscious emotional responses: evidence for a reversal of the arrow of time,”
Randi, James. Flim Flam: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions. Prometheus Books. Books.
Ryzl, Milan. Parapsychology: A Scientific Approach
Schmidt, Helmut (1970). “A Quantum Mechanical Random Number Generator for Psi Tests,” Journal of Parapsychology, Vol. 34(3) 219-224, 1970.
Schaut, G.B., & Persinger, M.A. (1985). Subjective telepathic experiences,
geomagnetic activity and the ELF hypothesis. Part I. Data analysis. Psi Research 4(1), 4- 2O.
Sidorov, Lian (2002) "On the possible mechanism of intent in paranormal phenomena," Journal of Non-Local and Remote Mental Interaction, Vol. 1(1). http://emergentmind.com/sidorov_II.htm
Sidrov, Lian (2003a). “Editor’s Note”, http://emergentmind.org/editor’snotes.htm
Sidorov. Lian (2003b). “Landscaping the Mind: Interview with Joseph McMoneagle,” http://emergentmind.org/mcmoneagle_II2.htm
Sidorov, Lian (2003c). “Thinking Outside the Box in Experimental Parapsychology,” http://emergentmind.org/sidorovII2.htm
Stanford, R.G. and C. R. Lovin (1970), "The eeg alpha rhythm and ESP performances": Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 64:4.
Stevenson, Ian (1970), Telepathic Impressions, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Swinney, Graywolf (2001). Holographic Healing, Wilderville: Asklepia Publishing.
Targ, Russell, & Hurt, David B. (1972). “Learning Clairvoyance and Perception with an Extra-Sensory Teaching machine,” Parapsychology Review, Vol.3(44) 9-11, 1972.
Ullman, Montague and Stanley Krippner (1973), Dream Telepathy, New York: McMillan Publishing Co.
Intentionality
NTENTIONALITY: THE PSI BUZZWORD 10.16.06;
Vol. IV No. 2 Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions, OpEd article.
http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
by Iona Miller, 2006
"I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep...If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Fodor 1987, 97)
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.” This is an intrisic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and acurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK). In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over. Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics, hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time. But this in no way means that this is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity. And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive. So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results? If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic? Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth. From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image. Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will. Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world? If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal. Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so may acts of consciousness have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance. Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researrchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others. ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
REFERENCES REFERENCES
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Vol. IV No. 2 Journal of Nonlocality and Remote Mental Interactions, OpEd article.
http://emergentmind.org/journal.htm
THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS
by Iona Miller, 2006
"I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they've been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will perhaps appear on their list. But aboutness surely won't; intentionality simply doesn't go that deep...If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else." (Fodor 1987, 97)
Doctrine of Intentionality
Jung (1961) said, "To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly; all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of life for better or worse.”
There are several subcultures whose worldviews embrace psi phenomena as Reality, or react as if they do. They range through governments to tribal people to new agers and neo-pagans to leading-edge researchers. Even the most skeptical scientist can be compartmentalized or even superstitious in his or her subjective thinking at times.
To conduct sound research, we must catch ourselves in the act of trying to verify our own preconceptions, a “perception Lab.” This is an intrisic problem of armchair scientists who are long on theory and short on experimentation. We have to pierce beyond the perceptual artifact to solid postulates, testable hypotheses, rigorous protocols, and acurate statistical analysis.
But psi may prove to be more than just an artifact of primitive belief. Meta-narratives emerge as mythologizing, literature, psychology, sociology, religion or philosophy and cutting-edge science theories. The philosophy of science describes the dynamics of the scientific method. The issue of intentionality is riddled with philosophical problems. Moreso, remote mental intention. Is a brain state the template for action?
The loose use of the term intentionality as a buzzword is an import into pop culture from philosophy. As a collective belief, it has boomeranged back into the public and new age thought from psi research meta-analysis, justified by the research of Radin, Emoto, Schlitz, Targ, Taggert and others.
"Psi intentionality" is a term lifted from remote viewing and other distance intentionality practices and psi energetic theories. It has been confounded with physics notion of nonlocality, entanglement, resonance and "spooky action at a distance", peculiar to particular theories of quantum mechanics, and holism or holographic models. It is shorthand for what might be called quantum psychokinesis (PK). In psi theory, the transmission of information from a sender to receiver is less problematical than physical influence.
Intentionality bears on ontological and metaphysical questions about the fundamental nature of mental states: perceiving, remembering, expectancy, believing, desiring, hoping, knowing, intending, feeling, experiencing, and so on. What is it to have such mental states? How does the mental relate to the physical, i.e., how are mental states related to an individual's body, to states of his or her brain and to his or her behavior?
Intentionality is a pervasive feature of many different mental states: beliefs, hopes, judgments, intentions, love and hatred all exhibit intentionality. In an ideal world we can mentally wish things into and out of existence. It can seem that consciousness and intentionality pervade mental life. Perhaps one or both somehow constitute what it is to have a mind.
But achieving an articulate general understanding of either consciousness or intentionality presents an enormous challenge, part of which lies in figuring out how the two are related. In plain talk, we consider a behavior intentional when it appears purposeful or done intentionally -- that is, based on reasons (beliefs, desires) and performed with skill and awareness.
Just because the subject of psi remains objectively problematical doesn’t mean we should stop systematic investigation, both scientifically and metaphysically. Babies don’t know how the world works so they constantly keep testing their environment, over and over. Are we just cosmic babies, feeling our way along, blindly? We are when it comes to proofs of mind over matter. Perhaps intentionality is a permissible metaphor until we have a better shorthand for the effect. But we really need a bigger and better metaphor already without trotting out the well-worn notion of paradigm shift - another buzzword.
Quantum Chaos
We must be willing to question our own beliefs, comprehending the nature of subjectivity, experimenter bias, and memes or groupthink. The mind deploys them as explanations for unknown agency, the blindspots of our consciousness. As ever, any postulate and hypothesis we can make depends on "which" physics it is based in, since there are several competing models: Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Transactional, M-Theory, Plenum Physics, hyperspace, etc.
This simple fact makes quantum physics a domain of self-contained, mutually exclusive belief systems with their own presumed truths about the primordial nature of Reality. New Agers and armchair philosophers often confound them together into half-baked theories, sometimes compounded by theories of “ascension”, aliens, and evolution.
Philosophically, what does it mean that man's intention now substitutes for the exiled Demiurge, or divine "maker"? We've put ourselves in place of God or nature to augment healing, muddle about in global politics, and presumably perturb our evolutionary arc. We have to question how much more effective realworld pro-active behavior might be, considering that "if wishes were horses, beggars would ride." There is no end to the places the human ego would like to meddle in structure, meaning and labeling.
Ordinary intentionality means being directed toward some goal. It comes down to a control issue; who's got it and who wants it. Perhaps the most compelling results come from the realms of mindbody healing by deploring human beliefs and activating the mysterious placebo effect for shorter or longer periods of time. But this in no way means that this is a quantum process, since the mechanisms may be largely molecular and biochemical. We know that both psychosomatics and psychosemantics are influential.
“Fill in the blank” explanations can be outlandish, possible, plausible, probable, or match reality. The distinction between "true believers" and skeptics comes at the point of interpretation of phenomena, attributions of the source of events or perceptions, whether one's model is psibernetics, "magical thinking", external agents, nested hierarchies, holistic mysticism, or physicalism.
A theist will tend to attribute positive expectations of “agency” to God, a pagan to nature, a humanist to self, and an atheist to complex dynamics, or randomness,. A debunker is dismissive. A true skeptic remains open-minded, at home in the ambiguity. And the loose use of the buzzword ‘intentionality’ leaves its agent or means totally ambiguous, meaning not mechanism.
Is anomalous intentionality a catalyst? It came into the psi lexicon from consciousness studies and a few psi experiments that showed some promise suggesting mind/matter interaction. The protocols of all these experiments are questionable in terms of rigour even though the field polices itself. Replication for these studies is far from exhaustive. So, maybe it isn't outlandish, and perhaps it is possible, and maybe its plausible. But in no way is it probable. And we don't really know the deepest nature of reality to know whether it matches or we are simply deluding ourselves with a romantic notion.
My Karma Ran Over My Dogma
This fashionable term for mind/matter interaction, "intentionality", fails as a shorthand to explain anything. "Free will" has been dismissed as an agent by most consciousness researchers, though evolutionary intentionality is connected with the dynamic behavior of systems. You may as well call it karma, luck, or True Will, like the magicians do. Karma, whether you believe in it or not, at its root just means natural consequences of behavior.
Does it really work to claim an intention to be intentional? Doesn’t intentionality always imply future tense rather than concrete results? If the paradoxical implication is that the intentional result is acausal, isn’t that a pretzel-twist in logic? Jung tried to account for an acausal factor with his notion of synchronicity, but it is hardly testable, though most of us notice meaningful coicidences all the time. But then human beings have an inclination to look for "signs". Why this is so is another avenue of sociological investigation.
Even in clinical research, to name psi expression intentionality doesn't make it so. In actual fact, most of us can’t form enough intentionality to drink the amount of water the body needs each day or eat healthy. The unresolved New Year’s resolution is a truism.
What makes us think we can be more consistently intentional in the extradimensional? It is a ‘fantasy of intentionality,’ a subjective hypothesis that human intervention at some subtle level perturbs outcomes in some desirable manner. It might express our insecurity in an uncertain, uncontrollable world more than a physics process.
People often mystify their experiences unnecessarily when they don't have a more plausible explanation. It is endlessly interesting to speculate on, but the notion that the all-knowing nonlocal field identity exerts some influence over environment and personality may simply be mythopoesis, myth-making.
In mythopoesis many cultural forms meet and form an organic fusion. Does the contemporary revival of myth with focus on our creative potential point to the possibility of a unified world, a neo-Utopian variant where we wish and make it so? If collective intentionality could create a better world, why didn't we do it long ago?
The real question is why do all cultures engage in mythopoeisis? Mythopoesis means change, re-mythologizing in times of cultural chaos. What I mean here is not a mis-spelling, but an amalgamation of mythopoesis or story-making and the autopoeitic self-organization of chaos theory; self-maintaining unity.
Autopoiesis describes the way living systems address and engage domains in which they operate. What human need do these mythically patterned meta-theories fill? Identification with the field body may just be another way of being attached to a belief to explain the Unknowable, to push the agent beyond the threshold of observability.
The Emperor’s New Intentionality
The notion "we create our own reality" is a relative truth. From a Jungian point of view, any "intentionality" we could exert would be subject to the competing agendas of autonomous archetyal forces and dynamics that don't give a fig about your personality needs. Existentially, we are moved by more than a single metaphor, a single role, a singlular self-image. Whatever you choose to call them, we harbor nested competing agendas, conscious and unconscious.
Even in chaos theory, many forget there are strange repellors as well as strange attractors. Resonance is another buzzword rapidly equalling the old standby of spiritualism, “vibrations”, which has found vindication in quantum and vacuum fluctuation But somehow, both in our lives and quantum mechanics, these extradimensional entanglements are unobservable, beyond physics, and therefore strictly speaking, metaphysical.
The ancients conceived of magic working through focus and will. Now a diffuse holistic awareness is preferred, perturbing the quantum flow. Whether we think we are changing reality through a focused act of will or even by "broad-beam" self-transformation the whole scenario may be a self-delusion cast in perennial truths and pseudo-scientific terms.
If it bothers or offends you to think otherwise, this is more likely true. There is emotional attachment there, not clarity. If you think you can do it by "aligning" yourself rather than manifestation, why are you harboring fantasies of misalignment? It makes little sense that the particle "intends" and the field "corresponds". In Nature, the reverse leads to manifestion.
Is this notion harboring a demiurgic God-complex, a control fantasy in an otherwise uncontrollable world? If we believe in God, why do we presume to interfere with that fiat by introjecting our small agendas? Does it conceal a spiritual hubris to be co-equal or co-creator with divinity? Or, more to the point, why would we look to the divine as an agent of psychophysical dynamics?
Nonlocal Intentions
Intentions may or may not exert a nonlocal organizing effect. They do when they mobilize effective action. Often the 'butterfly effect' of chaos theory is invoked for pumping holistic mental effects up to macro- proportions. But chaos theory doesn't organize through intentionality; just the opposite, by criticality.
Correlation is not identity. There is appearance being and process being, which correlate with particle/wave. We are both particle and field, and they are both complex, and may be analogous or metaphorically connected to the hypothesis of intentionality - but that doesn't make it real: it makes it a belief, an operational worldview. The ego somehow facilitating the holistic self to manifest is solipsistic, because the field self is in no way diminished even by negative thinking by personality.
If you think distant intentionality works for you, that is an interpretation, an arbitrary allocation of a cause to a perceived effect, which may be largely unrelated and/or statistically irrelevant. Once the narrative is "set", that becomes the story and the person zealously sticks to it, right or wrong. This is human nature and the nature of emotional investment. It may be the eternal human yen to create order from the fear and chaos of our lives and cleave to faith in the Great Beyond, whatever one thinks resides there.
A myriad of "brandable" new age technologies are based on non-scientific interpretations and confabulations of scientific theory. Though having its own organic root in metaphysics, new age tech has hijacked and romanticized the philosophical territory of psi research with its own prosaic interpretations. Because it makes a romantically appealing metaphor doesn't mean it matches up with naked Reality. Often incompatible physics theories are confounded together for the so-called explanations.
Psi and Intentionality
Four models of psi intentionality are drawn from relativity theory and two from quantum mechanics. First is the energetic transmission model, which presumes the effects of conscious intention are mediated by an as-yet-unknown energy signal. Second is the model of path facilitation. According to general relativity, gravity "warps" space–time, easing certain pathways of movement, so may acts of consciousness have warping and facilitating effects on the fabric of the surrounding world.
Nonlocal entanglement is drawn from quantum mechanics, suggesting people, like particles, can become entangled so they behave as one system with instantaneous and unmediated correlations across a distance. Actualization of potentials reflects the act of measurement in quantum mechanics collapsing a probabilistic wave function into a single outcome. This notion of observer effect relates only to the standard Copenhagen interpretation of QM. Researrchers claim conscious healing intention and alignment may actualize one of a series of possibilities; for example, recovery from a potentially lethal tumor.
Psi researchers must be careful to see these explanatory buzzwords like 'alignment' and 'intentionality' for what they are, smoke and mirrors explaining nothing, not what some say they are. Like the next new buzzword, "extradimensionality", it is just a displacement into the Unknown of a process that may be something entirely other than what the experiencer thinks it is.
To get to the Truth we have to follow the age-old axiom to ‘Know Thyself,’ and be willing to engage in some conceptual atom-smashing of our cherished notions. Otherwise, one engages in a pre-conceived, self-confirmatory journey for validation not a Quest for knowledge.
Rather than extradimensional participation in some subtle physics process, it may just be another trick of the mind - in the end, nothing more than a concept that doesn't match up with nor describe Reality. Oh sure, intentionality may function mystically in some nonfungable parallel universe, or that could be just another mentally attractive perennial fantasy. Those most concerned with “changing the paradigm” may be among those most firmly attached to their own idiosyncratic interpretations.
If there are memes in our culture, there are strange attractors in our thought patterns, that can harden into fixed beliefs. The fact is we don't know, and anyone who charges you and says they do is a either a fraud or self-deluded, or both. We are components of mythic culture which recursively regenerates itself in a network of self-similar productions.
Anywhere there is non-equilibrium, a gap in personal or cultural awareness, myth will self-organize a meta-narrative to fill the lacuna. Mythic beliefs are self-contained. Even fantasies of holism automatically exclude other options, except through embedding and hierarchy.
There are many aspects of psi, some more credible and testable than others. ESP (information transfer) is the most plausble, psychokinesis (mind over matter) most problematical. Serious researchers are beyond parlour tricks such as seances, regressions, or ghostbusting.
Still, there is no scientific or spiritual consensus about the mechanics of physics or consciousness, much less mind/matter interaction or the influence of one mind on another organism. Some models appeal to our intuition, others are profoundly counter-intuitive. But Mystery doesn't need to be metaphysical, mystical, nor dismissed as "noetic nonsense". It simply isn't limited by any of our concepts nor scientific blindspots. We can just admit we stand in the Mystery.
The way to keep a path alive is to walk on it. Studying psi phenomena invariably involves extracting a signal from a lot of noise: the only credible way to do that is scientifically. But for many researchers, those disconcerting or luminous moments of utter uncanniness in our own personal experience sustain our interest, year after year. The effects aren't so much in question as the images and the way we imagine them.
REFERENCES REFERENCES
Fodor, Jerry. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987.
Leder, Drew (1995) "Spooky Actions at a Distance": Physics, Psi, and Distant Healing, Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Oct 2005, Vol. 11, No. 5 : 923 -930 Schlitz, Marilyn and Braud, William (1997). "Distance intentionality and healing", Alternative Therapies, Vol. 3, No. 6.
Fortean Times
Remote Viewing at the Monroe InstituteSince its perhaps surprising acceptance as a surveillance device within the intelligence community, Remote Viewing has gone through a transformation to become part of the New Age toolkit. Mark Blacklock visits one of RV’s elder statesmen in the USA.By Mark BlacklockAugust 2004 At the Monroe Institute in Virginia, non-local consciousness is a reality. Ditto life after death. Out-of-body experiences occur on a daily basis and in the labs they’re conducting research into the reported collapse of sub-atomic randomness during periods when human consciousness is focused on particular events. Oh yes, and you can learn Remote Viewing techniques from alumni of the US military psychic spying programmes. It seems fair to say that it’s not your average rural retreat.
As F Holmes ‘Skip’ Atwater, Research Director at the Institute and, from 1977 to 1987, Operations and Training Officer for the Army Intelligence Branch of the US government’s RV programme, points out: “A week-long cruise in the Bahamas is about the same price as a week-long cruise in consciousness.”
The Institute emerged out of the experimental work of Robert Monroe (pictured below), a radio producer and television executive, who had become interested in human consciousness research in the late 1950s, when he began having what would come to be termed ‘out-of-body-experiences’. His first thought was that he was suffering some sort of mental illness. When his doctor could find nothing wrong with him, Monroe decided to investigate the matter himself, setting up a small research programme within his company to look into the feasibility of learning during sleep.
According to Monroe’s official biography: “In the ensuing years, Mr Monroe and his group began work on means and methods of inducing and controlling this and other forms of consciousness in their laboratory. As specialists in creating patterns of effective sound, they used this base for their research.”
By 1974, the set-up had been christened the Monroe Institute, and by 1975 Monroe’s researchers had discovered (and patented) Hemi-Sync audio technology.
The genteel Blue Ridge Mountain range in south east Virginia is steeped in history. Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson lies in the Piedmont foothills nearby; President James Monroe lived on the Ash-Lawn Highland Estate near Charlottesville and James Madison lived in the city itself. Within a 150-mile radius of Washington DC and rising above the surrounding seats of Federal and military government, this American paradise has long attracted the wealthy and well-to-do, while tourists come from all over the States to see the colourful display put on by the autumn trees, when all around the hills are covered in russet and brown leaves. Visitors can hike along the southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail, stopping by one of the numerous orchards to pick their own apples. The temperatures stay in the 20s and 30s Celcius until mid-October. When the temperatures do drop in winter, the luxury Wintergreen Ski Resort keeps the holidaymakers coming.
But none of this can quite match what’s on offer at the Monroe Institute.
Cycling nut Martin Verhuys, owner of the Acorn Inn, hasn’t been on a course at the Monroe Institute but he has plenty of contact with the organisation. A lot of his guests are either about to begin or have just ended a course there. He has also used Hemi-Sync tapes. “Some years ago I had a serious cycling accident and a friend lent me some of their tapes – just for helping me sleep. I’m not interested in big hocus pocus but they did work. His voice and the sounds... After a while I didn’t need the tapes any more, I could do it on my own.” The voice in question was Monroe’s. “He was a very good man,” says Martin.
He is a little less generous about some of his other neighbours, whom he views in a slightly comical light. Because, unexpectedly, the Monroe Institute turns out to have some very local competition in the meditation game.
“This is a hot-bed of, I guess you say, New Age stuff,” explains Martin. “There is a meditation centre just the other side. Brother Charles came to Monroe and he must have thought ‘I’ll set up nearby’. He has his own tapes.” This centre is called the Syncronicity Center. “Bob Monroe didn’t want to be a guru,” adds Martin. “His approach was more scientific.”
Hemi-Sync has become a key feature of Monroe’s legacy. Not only has it provided the platform and basis for his tapes and CDs which compete seriously in the New Age market for relaxation and meditation aids, but it has inspired a number of imitators, including the Synchronicity Center. Hemi-Sync is a tool for achieving the altered states of consciousness in which Monroe was interested. How does it work?
The continuous electrical activity of the brain was first recorded by Dr Hans Berger, the “Father of Electro-encephalography”, in 1924. Berger described this symphony of electrical activity in terms of frequency bands: gamma (greater than 30Hz) beta (13-30Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), and delta (less than 4 Hz). He noted that these frequency bands were roughly associated with different states of consciousness; beta being the waking, alert state; alpha, a relaxed state; theta, a transitory, intermediary state before sleep; and delta, deep sleep, the frequency of brain activity being faster for more alert states.
Berger’s work has allowed modern researchers interested in consciousness to monitor the activity of the brain and note its changes, thereby providing some externally recorded empirical data to accompany records of subjective experience. Berger simply classified activity already occurring. Monroe’s discovery was apparently a tool for accelerating the alternation between these different bands of brain activity, an automatic gearbox which improved upon evolution’s manual transmission.
Skip Atwater explains how Hemi-Sync effects these patterns: “Different frequencies are played in each ear, which causes the brain to interpret a phase difference. So, the phase difference is interpreted by the brain as being a vibrato. And because we can adjust the frequencies between the two ears, we can change the rate of that vibration within brain wave frequencies and route it where we want the person to go in terms of their consciousness.”
The idea of altering the electrical frequency of the brain with an audio signal was fairly radical and remains the main focus of the Monroe Institute’s proselytising. Dr Darlene Miller, the Institute’s Director of Programmes, explains how the Institute is working to have Hemi-Sync enshrined in traditional scientific literature.
“We have a Professional Division,” she says. “These people do research away from here in universities and we’re getting a body of scientific study that shows that this Hemi-Sync technology leads people into certain states of consciousness and also leads to certain prescribed results. For instance, we have a series of exercises called the Surgical Support series, which is used before, during and after surgery. And there are a number of studies now that show that people using this series require less anæsthesia, their blood pressure is lower, they come out of the recovery room more alert, with less need for pain medication and their stay in hospital is days less than without the Hemi-Sync. That’s good information. You have that compared to a control group who didn’t use the Hemi-Sync, that’s traditional Western scientific methodology.”
And indeed, this work does seem to have been rigorous enough to have been published in a handful of respectable journals such as Physiology & Behavior and Anaesthesiology. But some of the other claims made at the Institute, and also for Hemi-Sync, are rather trickier to pin down. “If you ask me for a study to prove that this leads to the out-of-body state or enables someone to talk to a loved one who has died, then we get into areas that are very difficult,” admits Dr Miller.
Dr Miller has been working at the Monroe Institute since 1984. “I was actually working and living in Colorado and I had friends who came to one of the very first residential programmes here. At the time I was the director of a 180-bed institution for violent sex offenders. I’m also a clinical psychologist. My training is very traditional.” Her upbringing was similarly traditional. “I’d been raised a Fundamentalist Christian. My family is still to the right of Jerry Fallwell. I had a lot to overcome in terms of that. To their minds this is still the work of the devil. It’s not biblical.”
Dr Miller’s medical background is useful at Monroe. In dealing with altered consciousness, it is important to be able to recognise those who might react adversely to further consciousness alteration. “The only thing I’m bothered about is whether they’ve had any hospitalisations for mental health disorders,” says Dr Miller. “Or, if they’ve been in therapy, what was the diagnosis and circumstances of that and are they on any current medication? Obviously, because this is powerful stuff, you want people to be pretty well-hinged to handle the intensity of it.”
Occasionally, unhinged people slip through the net. “There have been a few circumstances where people have been on the edge and we didn’t know because they didn’t fill out their application honestly. They’ve lost the distinctions and actual boundaries – how to classify things. They just lost those distinctions, and we don’t want that to happen.”
I’ve arrived at the Monroe Institute for just a couple of days. Because the currently running course is an advanced programme called Lifeline, open only to graduates of the Gateway Voyage Course, I am not permitted to participate. I had been hoping to meet some of the students on the course but, sadly, this is not to be.
“Almost solely it’s because part of the learning experience and quite a lot of what people come here for is the group energy, the synergy of what happens with people of similar intent,” explains Dr Miller. “And so there’s a confidentiality around that. There are a lot of deep sharing experiences.”
It’s disappointing, but my trip is confined to a couple of chats with Dr Miller and a guided tour of the facility in the company of Atwater. After an introductory chinwag, Dr Miller takes me to a conference room to watch a promotional video featuring Monroe describing his early out-of-body experiences. Dr Miller has to wrangle with the video and isn’t enjoying much success. Suddenly, the whole thing comes to life. “Wow,” she says. “That’s strange. That kind of thing happens a lot round here.”
After the video, we head over to the main building to have a look at where students stay, in two-bed dorms with little bunks which are referred to as “check-in units”. There are audio speakers on the walls in each unit, level with the pillow. These are used to pipe in the Hemi-Sync tapes of the student’s choice. The student is encouraged to use the meditation aids as much as possible. Given that Monroe’s initial research was focused on learning during sleep, this includes the hours after lights-out. This is an immersive experience, as explained by Dr Miller.
“We don’t have TV, we don’t have radios, we don’t have newspapers. We encourage people not to call their businesses and find out what the stock market is doing – we encourage people just to be here. There’s a sense of community and family, people get very close to the group, people say they feel like they’ve known these people before, there’s a great synergy.”
As I’m looking around a check-in unit with photographer Justin Canning, the two students whose room it is return from lunch. Dr Miller is a little flustered, presumably worried about disturbances in synergy, but the students are okay with us being there. One of the girls spots Justin’s digital camera. “Hey,” she says, “did you get a glow on your pictures?”
Justin is politely noncommittal, but the student won’t be dissuaded. “I took some pictures of my check-in unit and it’s like there’s a strange glow around it. Like some kind of aura.” She fetches her camera to show us a couple of out-of-focus and blurry shots of her bunk. Once again, Justin’s politesse is to the fore.
After we’ve made our excuses and parted company with the students, Dr Miller, looking rather serious, turns to Justin and asks: “Do you think there was anything to what she showed you?” Justin does his best to describe his doubts without being rude, rambling a bit about exposure speeds. Dr Miller nods sagely but seems a little disappointed. Later, Justin tells me that the student’s camera was worth several thousand pounds.
Skip Atwater has an infectious and girly giggle, which sounds rather odd when you first hear it coming from a six-foot-plus ex-army man with a crew cut. He is one of the main reasons for our visit here, as I suspect he is for many who now venture to Monroe. His military background is almost legendary, and his presence at Monroe lends the proceedings a certain ‘black ops’ cachet.
He’s now Research Director at the Institute, and he takes obvious joy in showing us around a lab which, one suspects, is even more richly equipped than those he used in the army. There are vast banks of recording equipment, computers in which all the digital audio processing work is done, an isolation chamber kitted out with gear for recording pulse rates and electrical brain activity… and a water mattress.
“This is a flotation bed,” says Atwater. “While students lie on the flotation bed it’s very womb-like. The water is warmed to skin temperature. You can get very relaxed in this bed. The booth is lined in copper on all six surfaces, so that it makes a Faraday Cage while you’re in here and outside radiation doesn’t penetrate in here and affect the person – it’s a neutral electronic environment. And they prevent sound from getting in here. It’s a quiet kind of environment.”
Atwater chuckles as he tells us that the mattress once escaped the cage of its own accord. “Capillary traction. You remember the movie The Blob? It was just like this big huge blob had escaped.”
His background is well known. In September 1995, the US military officially shut down its RV operations, launched at the height of the Cold War to close a perceived ‘psychic spying gap’ with the USSR. [See FT87: 27-30; 95: 34-39; 98: 57; 116: 66; 118:46]. At various times called Project Scanate, Flame Grill, Sun Streak and Stargate, these programmes had been funded to the tune of m over the course of 23 years.
“There were many different things going on,” says Atwater. “I was just the Army Intelligence branch. So I wasn’t the only thing in the whole world. I was a company grade officer, a captain, in a small unit in the Army, doing this for 10 years.”
Most of those involved remain convinced of the validity of this level of investment and point, for example, to Ingo Swann’s alleged Remote Viewing of a ring around Jupiter, discovered and confirmed in early 1979, six years after the Jupiter Probe had taken place, or various results achieved in double-blind experiments.
Others claim that even these results are inconclusive and, certainly, the scribbled drawings produced as evidence of the sites viewed are difficult to accept as anything other than ambiguous sketches. The waters are muddied even further, however, by some of those who have made a career from telling the story of their experiences.
I raise one such muddy area with Atwater. Part of the US psychic spying programme focused on attempting to remotely influence the minds of individuals. In some of the wilder stories concerning the Soviet programmes, there is talk of remote murder, of the exploration of psychic techniques for use in assassinations. Given the immersive nature of the experience offered to students at the Monroe Institute, it seems appropriate to raise the spectre of mind-control.
“The subject of mind-control comes up because it is thrilling, exciting and dangerous,” intones Atwater. “With my experience of Remote Viewing in the military there was never any mind-control or remote influencing. Now, you’ll get some people to say there was, but I think they’re motivated by wanting to sell some sort of book.”
“Recently, Joe MacMoneagle – another alumnus of the RV programme now also working at the Monroe Institute [see FT116: 66] – actually went to the Soviet Union and studied some of the research they’d done on these things and found that it was flawed research, that they had not looked at their data in the correct way, used the correct statistics. So the Russians were very happy that he had looked at it and they re-did the experiments and found that there was no link at all. The things that leaked out – there’s a famous book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, I think it came out in the Sixties or Seventies – were really thrilling and dangerous. Well, the science behind that turned out to be flawed science. So, at the present time, to my knowledge, there is no concept of direct mental influence.”
But was Atwater party to experiments exploring potential influencing of remote subjects? “We have used with Remote Viewing a form of remote hypnosis. During interrogation, having a remote viewer suggest to the person that’s being interrogated that if he cooperates he’ll get to see his family again. Now, could someone twist that story into a wild tale of mind control? Yes, but those same people would take a psychiatrist and say that the word therapist, when you spell it out, is ‘the rapist’. In my experience this idea of mind-control is mostly fiction and sells books and makes good movies.”
I mention that Atwater’s life now, at the Monroe Institute, seems a far cry from his military career. For him, it was always going to be thus. “I think that in my younger years I was sort of guided into that unit in the military so that I could learn about that. Now I think that the real value of this ESP or Remote Viewing is not in the information that you uncover, not in finding missed children or hidden secrets of the enemy, or missing terrorists for that matter, I think the real value is in self-discovery: who you really are, that you are more, in fact, than your physical body; that you’re interconnected, one with everyone else, in a very unusual way. That you are on a path of evolutionary consciousness and that when you become aware of this you are responsible then for the evolution of your own consciousness.”
It will perhaps come as little surprise that Atwater, like Dr Miller, was raised by “metaphysically oriented parents… What the normal population would consider quite odd was normal in my family. So when I stumbled serendipitously into this programme in the military, it seemed quite natural to me.”
He speaks in incredibly measured tones and seems like a man at home with everything he says and does. He carries his large frame lightly and often talks in homilies, or what seem like pre-prepared spiels.
I become conscious of the fact that whatever I ask him, he seems happy with. This could, I am sure, in another mind become evidence of his influence over the conversation. Occasionally, however, and particularly on questions which refer to proof or evidence, his homilies wander a little.
For example, Atwater’s answer to the admittedly obvious question “is there anything to do with altered states of consciousness that can be empirically verified?” while expressing laudable sentiments, does seem to dodge the issue:
“I understand where your question comes from. I think that the answer is that love is a common experience. I think that people in these various states of consciousness, when they approach their situation with love, they all tend to report the same thing. For example, healing. Healing and love are connected in all instances of reporting. So there is a feeling that that must be a universal truth, that true healing comes from this emotion we identify as love.”
He points out, reasonably, the impossibility of measuring subjective experience and drawing direct lines between brain activity and what is actually appearing in someone’s mind’s eye. He does, however, put great faith in research being undertaken at the Paralabs at Princeton University which does seem to produce measurable results, research into the idea that “when there is some sort of focused awareness of an event happening, subatomic randomness seems to collapse just a little bit.”
“It is as though consciousness itself is affecting the subatomic world,” he says. “Note that I said, ‘as though’. It may not really be that. It may just be that a property of focused consciousness is non-randomness, that they may be co-existent events, not one causing the other.
“We’re interested in that in terms of our group classes here. When we run group classes of 25 people and they’re all intently concentrating on one thing, is that affecting our local random number generators? I’m running random number generators for our programmes to see if that’s happening. Can we recreate that anomaly with smaller groups of people?”
But any hope that we might see these results is also slim. “We don’t have the data yet,” he says. “This is ongoing.”
The idea of collective consciousness is key to the Monroe credo. There is much interest in a particular interpretation of the Jungian idea of archetypes (see FT171:42-47), and specifically light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type near-death experiences. But a couple of different archetypes, perhaps better referred to as clichés, can be found scattered around the Monroe Institute buildings.
“Dolphins are big here,” explains Dr Miller when I ask her about these. “Rainbows. Crystals. I don’t think it’s any mistake that certain common ones keep coming back and show up here. If we all share this consciousness and there’s something like a dolphin, which represents non-human intelligence, it becomes a symbol for that that’ll pop up wherever appropriate.”
I suggest that the selection of such symbols is at best arbitrary and at worst based on ignorance of what lies behind the symbol in question, with reference particularly to the behaviour of male dolphins, which have been discovered to perpetrate group rapes upon females. Dr Miller isn’t phased. “We don’t like to talk about those. They diminish the spirituality.”
Atwater is slightly more cagey on the New Age clichés. “Because Bob Monroe was a serious businessman himself, the imprint that he left here was that this was not so much ‘woo-woo’ – I don’t know how you’re going to spell that – it’s not airy-fairy, it’s ‘this is the facts the way I discovered them’. We don’t have a doctrine. We don’t wear white robes or eat only tofu. But you will find the occasional crystal out here. People like that kind of thing.”
Indeed, you will find “the occasional crystal” out here. A five-ton monstrosity sits eight feet (2.4m) high in the field below the Nancy Penn Center. Back at the Acorn Inn that night, Martin tells us it was transported from Brazil, at great personal expense, by a Monroe student.
Perhaps the strongest message coming through from both Atwater and Darlene Miller is that ‘the group’ is very important to Monroe Institute programmes.
The idea of group energy and synergy is held aloft like a holy chalice, and this necessarily raises certain questions about the psychology of groups, about what might happen when a group of people intently wants to achieve a prescribed result in terms of their conscious experience.
“Do I think there’s any kind of mass hallucination going on? No, I don’t,” says Dr Miller.
An odd sticker on Atwater’s desk elucidates the behaviour of Monroe groups quite unexpectedly. The sticker reads ‘Ask me about Focus 55’. Mainly because it seems churlish not to, I do ask Atwater about Focus 55.
“This is a cute sticker,” he says. “Bob Monroe assigned number levels for these different windows in consciousness, starting out with 10, 12, 15, 21. Well, there is no such thing as 55. But people get what I call focus envy. They start saying, ‘Well I was in 27’ – ‘Well I was in 36’. And so this always reminds me the numbers don’t always mean anything and a bigger number is not better than a smaller number. They are just arbitrary labels.”
A valley away, past the handful of bars, restaurants and shops that makes up Nellysford, Jim Meissner lives in a ramshackle house surrounded by trailers. In his trailers he keeps his equipment: electronics gear, machine tools, enough solder, nails, screws and wire to fill a hardware store. We’d met Meissner in Bistro 151, a sports bar and pizza joint in Nellysford, the night before we went to Monroe. We’d been chatting to Jane, the bar lady, when Jim had overheard our conversation.
“You guys are here to go to Monroe?”
“Yeah, we’re writing a story about it.”
“You should write a story about me.”
Meissner was in his early sixties, wearing thick-lensed prescription glasses and a stripy short-sleeved shirt with pens in the top pocket, a look immortalised by Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down. But he exuded none of the aggression of Douglas’s character. He was calm, friendly, perhaps a bit of a nerd. And, as he explained that night, he could heal people.
He had been drawn to Nellysford by the Monroe Institute. Following the death of his wife, he’d upped sticks from his home on the West Coast and come to Monroe to show them his invention: a box which took Robert Monroe’s Hemi-Sync technology and amped it up ten-fold. Or so he claimed.
“I used to listen to Bob Monroe’s tapes but they weren’t strong enough for me. So I improved on the Hemi-Sync technology.”
As an electrical engineer specialising in audio engineering, Jim had the skills to do this. He’d made his Brain State Synchronizer and taken it to Monroe and to Atwater. “Skip Atwater called me a snake-oil salesman,” Meissner told me with a hang-dog look. He’d been sent packing, condemned to reside in the next valley and to sell his invention online.
I’d asked Atwater about Meissner. He had remembered him, referring to him as a “Mr Wizard type of guy, an inventor”, and explained that he’d politely passed when offered the invention, having no need for it. But if Meissner’s version of events was true, and Atwater’s comment to him more than a little disingenuous, it wasn’t hard to see why Meissner’s presence might not have been seen as helpful to the smooth operation of the Monroe Institute.
Within minutes of being invited into Meissner’s house, I felt a little uneasy and wondered if Meissner himself might be having second thoughts about seeing us. Perhaps his bravado of the other evening had been fuelled by alcohol. Certainly, he was a little more nervous as he showed us around his messy, cobwebby home, the perfect habitat for a mad inventor.
He made it clear that he would rather I didn’t report certain areas of his research. He was concerned that in so doing I would draw the attention of the Federal Government to his activities, which he didn’t want. He explained why what he was doing represented such a threat to government, particularly the Health Administration. I promised him that I would not report on this research and intend to keep my word.
Suffice it to say, however, that unless I’m very much mistaken, Meissner’s research is in no way illegal, nor indeed of any particular use to anyone but a handful of people who share the same interests as Jim. His speakers are pretty impressive, though.
A lot of jargon is employed at the Monroe Institute. There is much talk of “mental dimensions”, “conducive states of consciousness”, and “realms of hypnagogic imagery”.
It must be hard for those who have undergone what they feel to be consciousness-altering experiences to put such experiences into words, and it is perhaps unavoidable that this sort of jargon has to be employed to pin down concepts larger than words themselves. Nevertheless, by the time we leave I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about consciousness.
Before we did leave, I asked to try out some Hemi-Sync tapes. Atwater put me in the isolation chamber. Protected from electrical radiation and wearing headphones which brought his gentle coaxings to me through the Faraday Cage, I dozed off, listening to the sounds of lapping water and Bob Monroe’s voice as they mixed down into phased tones.
I was in for an hour, apparently, and Atwater and photographer Justin Canning were able to hear my snoring through the microphones. I came out feeling incredibly spacey. I couldn’t say whether it had been any more positive an experience than your average mid-afternoon snooze, but I know I’d need a lot more Hemi-Sync before I could attempt Remote Viewing.
One thing is certain: Bob Monroe has achieved immortality, in a fashion, and proved his theories about life after death.
And it’s not just that the Institute is named after him. His voice lives on in the very fabric of the buildings, piped into the check-in units, the isolation chamber, spooling and spinning on tapes and discs. The Institute is a temple to Monroe, sculpted from the sound of his voice. His benign presence is everywhere. Whether it actually interferes with the video presentation equipment or forms non-corporeal hazes around the check-in units is open to debate. But it is undeniable that he lives on as long as the Institute remains in this beautiful corner of Virginia… and elsewhere, as long as his recordings are played.
As F Holmes ‘Skip’ Atwater, Research Director at the Institute and, from 1977 to 1987, Operations and Training Officer for the Army Intelligence Branch of the US government’s RV programme, points out: “A week-long cruise in the Bahamas is about the same price as a week-long cruise in consciousness.”
The Institute emerged out of the experimental work of Robert Monroe (pictured below), a radio producer and television executive, who had become interested in human consciousness research in the late 1950s, when he began having what would come to be termed ‘out-of-body-experiences’. His first thought was that he was suffering some sort of mental illness. When his doctor could find nothing wrong with him, Monroe decided to investigate the matter himself, setting up a small research programme within his company to look into the feasibility of learning during sleep.
According to Monroe’s official biography: “In the ensuing years, Mr Monroe and his group began work on means and methods of inducing and controlling this and other forms of consciousness in their laboratory. As specialists in creating patterns of effective sound, they used this base for their research.”
By 1974, the set-up had been christened the Monroe Institute, and by 1975 Monroe’s researchers had discovered (and patented) Hemi-Sync audio technology.
The genteel Blue Ridge Mountain range in south east Virginia is steeped in history. Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson lies in the Piedmont foothills nearby; President James Monroe lived on the Ash-Lawn Highland Estate near Charlottesville and James Madison lived in the city itself. Within a 150-mile radius of Washington DC and rising above the surrounding seats of Federal and military government, this American paradise has long attracted the wealthy and well-to-do, while tourists come from all over the States to see the colourful display put on by the autumn trees, when all around the hills are covered in russet and brown leaves. Visitors can hike along the southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail, stopping by one of the numerous orchards to pick their own apples. The temperatures stay in the 20s and 30s Celcius until mid-October. When the temperatures do drop in winter, the luxury Wintergreen Ski Resort keeps the holidaymakers coming.
But none of this can quite match what’s on offer at the Monroe Institute.
Cycling nut Martin Verhuys, owner of the Acorn Inn, hasn’t been on a course at the Monroe Institute but he has plenty of contact with the organisation. A lot of his guests are either about to begin or have just ended a course there. He has also used Hemi-Sync tapes. “Some years ago I had a serious cycling accident and a friend lent me some of their tapes – just for helping me sleep. I’m not interested in big hocus pocus but they did work. His voice and the sounds... After a while I didn’t need the tapes any more, I could do it on my own.” The voice in question was Monroe’s. “He was a very good man,” says Martin.
He is a little less generous about some of his other neighbours, whom he views in a slightly comical light. Because, unexpectedly, the Monroe Institute turns out to have some very local competition in the meditation game.
“This is a hot-bed of, I guess you say, New Age stuff,” explains Martin. “There is a meditation centre just the other side. Brother Charles came to Monroe and he must have thought ‘I’ll set up nearby’. He has his own tapes.” This centre is called the Syncronicity Center. “Bob Monroe didn’t want to be a guru,” adds Martin. “His approach was more scientific.”
Hemi-Sync has become a key feature of Monroe’s legacy. Not only has it provided the platform and basis for his tapes and CDs which compete seriously in the New Age market for relaxation and meditation aids, but it has inspired a number of imitators, including the Synchronicity Center. Hemi-Sync is a tool for achieving the altered states of consciousness in which Monroe was interested. How does it work?
The continuous electrical activity of the brain was first recorded by Dr Hans Berger, the “Father of Electro-encephalography”, in 1924. Berger described this symphony of electrical activity in terms of frequency bands: gamma (greater than 30Hz) beta (13-30Hz), alpha (8-12 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz), and delta (less than 4 Hz). He noted that these frequency bands were roughly associated with different states of consciousness; beta being the waking, alert state; alpha, a relaxed state; theta, a transitory, intermediary state before sleep; and delta, deep sleep, the frequency of brain activity being faster for more alert states.
Berger’s work has allowed modern researchers interested in consciousness to monitor the activity of the brain and note its changes, thereby providing some externally recorded empirical data to accompany records of subjective experience. Berger simply classified activity already occurring. Monroe’s discovery was apparently a tool for accelerating the alternation between these different bands of brain activity, an automatic gearbox which improved upon evolution’s manual transmission.
Skip Atwater explains how Hemi-Sync effects these patterns: “Different frequencies are played in each ear, which causes the brain to interpret a phase difference. So, the phase difference is interpreted by the brain as being a vibrato. And because we can adjust the frequencies between the two ears, we can change the rate of that vibration within brain wave frequencies and route it where we want the person to go in terms of their consciousness.”
The idea of altering the electrical frequency of the brain with an audio signal was fairly radical and remains the main focus of the Monroe Institute’s proselytising. Dr Darlene Miller, the Institute’s Director of Programmes, explains how the Institute is working to have Hemi-Sync enshrined in traditional scientific literature.
“We have a Professional Division,” she says. “These people do research away from here in universities and we’re getting a body of scientific study that shows that this Hemi-Sync technology leads people into certain states of consciousness and also leads to certain prescribed results. For instance, we have a series of exercises called the Surgical Support series, which is used before, during and after surgery. And there are a number of studies now that show that people using this series require less anæsthesia, their blood pressure is lower, they come out of the recovery room more alert, with less need for pain medication and their stay in hospital is days less than without the Hemi-Sync. That’s good information. You have that compared to a control group who didn’t use the Hemi-Sync, that’s traditional Western scientific methodology.”
And indeed, this work does seem to have been rigorous enough to have been published in a handful of respectable journals such as Physiology & Behavior and Anaesthesiology. But some of the other claims made at the Institute, and also for Hemi-Sync, are rather trickier to pin down. “If you ask me for a study to prove that this leads to the out-of-body state or enables someone to talk to a loved one who has died, then we get into areas that are very difficult,” admits Dr Miller.
Dr Miller has been working at the Monroe Institute since 1984. “I was actually working and living in Colorado and I had friends who came to one of the very first residential programmes here. At the time I was the director of a 180-bed institution for violent sex offenders. I’m also a clinical psychologist. My training is very traditional.” Her upbringing was similarly traditional. “I’d been raised a Fundamentalist Christian. My family is still to the right of Jerry Fallwell. I had a lot to overcome in terms of that. To their minds this is still the work of the devil. It’s not biblical.”
Dr Miller’s medical background is useful at Monroe. In dealing with altered consciousness, it is important to be able to recognise those who might react adversely to further consciousness alteration. “The only thing I’m bothered about is whether they’ve had any hospitalisations for mental health disorders,” says Dr Miller. “Or, if they’ve been in therapy, what was the diagnosis and circumstances of that and are they on any current medication? Obviously, because this is powerful stuff, you want people to be pretty well-hinged to handle the intensity of it.”
Occasionally, unhinged people slip through the net. “There have been a few circumstances where people have been on the edge and we didn’t know because they didn’t fill out their application honestly. They’ve lost the distinctions and actual boundaries – how to classify things. They just lost those distinctions, and we don’t want that to happen.”
I’ve arrived at the Monroe Institute for just a couple of days. Because the currently running course is an advanced programme called Lifeline, open only to graduates of the Gateway Voyage Course, I am not permitted to participate. I had been hoping to meet some of the students on the course but, sadly, this is not to be.
“Almost solely it’s because part of the learning experience and quite a lot of what people come here for is the group energy, the synergy of what happens with people of similar intent,” explains Dr Miller. “And so there’s a confidentiality around that. There are a lot of deep sharing experiences.”
It’s disappointing, but my trip is confined to a couple of chats with Dr Miller and a guided tour of the facility in the company of Atwater. After an introductory chinwag, Dr Miller takes me to a conference room to watch a promotional video featuring Monroe describing his early out-of-body experiences. Dr Miller has to wrangle with the video and isn’t enjoying much success. Suddenly, the whole thing comes to life. “Wow,” she says. “That’s strange. That kind of thing happens a lot round here.”
After the video, we head over to the main building to have a look at where students stay, in two-bed dorms with little bunks which are referred to as “check-in units”. There are audio speakers on the walls in each unit, level with the pillow. These are used to pipe in the Hemi-Sync tapes of the student’s choice. The student is encouraged to use the meditation aids as much as possible. Given that Monroe’s initial research was focused on learning during sleep, this includes the hours after lights-out. This is an immersive experience, as explained by Dr Miller.
“We don’t have TV, we don’t have radios, we don’t have newspapers. We encourage people not to call their businesses and find out what the stock market is doing – we encourage people just to be here. There’s a sense of community and family, people get very close to the group, people say they feel like they’ve known these people before, there’s a great synergy.”
As I’m looking around a check-in unit with photographer Justin Canning, the two students whose room it is return from lunch. Dr Miller is a little flustered, presumably worried about disturbances in synergy, but the students are okay with us being there. One of the girls spots Justin’s digital camera. “Hey,” she says, “did you get a glow on your pictures?”
Justin is politely noncommittal, but the student won’t be dissuaded. “I took some pictures of my check-in unit and it’s like there’s a strange glow around it. Like some kind of aura.” She fetches her camera to show us a couple of out-of-focus and blurry shots of her bunk. Once again, Justin’s politesse is to the fore.
After we’ve made our excuses and parted company with the students, Dr Miller, looking rather serious, turns to Justin and asks: “Do you think there was anything to what she showed you?” Justin does his best to describe his doubts without being rude, rambling a bit about exposure speeds. Dr Miller nods sagely but seems a little disappointed. Later, Justin tells me that the student’s camera was worth several thousand pounds.
Skip Atwater has an infectious and girly giggle, which sounds rather odd when you first hear it coming from a six-foot-plus ex-army man with a crew cut. He is one of the main reasons for our visit here, as I suspect he is for many who now venture to Monroe. His military background is almost legendary, and his presence at Monroe lends the proceedings a certain ‘black ops’ cachet.
He’s now Research Director at the Institute, and he takes obvious joy in showing us around a lab which, one suspects, is even more richly equipped than those he used in the army. There are vast banks of recording equipment, computers in which all the digital audio processing work is done, an isolation chamber kitted out with gear for recording pulse rates and electrical brain activity… and a water mattress.
“This is a flotation bed,” says Atwater. “While students lie on the flotation bed it’s very womb-like. The water is warmed to skin temperature. You can get very relaxed in this bed. The booth is lined in copper on all six surfaces, so that it makes a Faraday Cage while you’re in here and outside radiation doesn’t penetrate in here and affect the person – it’s a neutral electronic environment. And they prevent sound from getting in here. It’s a quiet kind of environment.”
Atwater chuckles as he tells us that the mattress once escaped the cage of its own accord. “Capillary traction. You remember the movie The Blob? It was just like this big huge blob had escaped.”
His background is well known. In September 1995, the US military officially shut down its RV operations, launched at the height of the Cold War to close a perceived ‘psychic spying gap’ with the USSR. [See FT87: 27-30; 95: 34-39; 98: 57; 116: 66; 118:46]. At various times called Project Scanate, Flame Grill, Sun Streak and Stargate, these programmes had been funded to the tune of m over the course of 23 years.
“There were many different things going on,” says Atwater. “I was just the Army Intelligence branch. So I wasn’t the only thing in the whole world. I was a company grade officer, a captain, in a small unit in the Army, doing this for 10 years.”
Most of those involved remain convinced of the validity of this level of investment and point, for example, to Ingo Swann’s alleged Remote Viewing of a ring around Jupiter, discovered and confirmed in early 1979, six years after the Jupiter Probe had taken place, or various results achieved in double-blind experiments.
Others claim that even these results are inconclusive and, certainly, the scribbled drawings produced as evidence of the sites viewed are difficult to accept as anything other than ambiguous sketches. The waters are muddied even further, however, by some of those who have made a career from telling the story of their experiences.
I raise one such muddy area with Atwater. Part of the US psychic spying programme focused on attempting to remotely influence the minds of individuals. In some of the wilder stories concerning the Soviet programmes, there is talk of remote murder, of the exploration of psychic techniques for use in assassinations. Given the immersive nature of the experience offered to students at the Monroe Institute, it seems appropriate to raise the spectre of mind-control.
“The subject of mind-control comes up because it is thrilling, exciting and dangerous,” intones Atwater. “With my experience of Remote Viewing in the military there was never any mind-control or remote influencing. Now, you’ll get some people to say there was, but I think they’re motivated by wanting to sell some sort of book.”
“Recently, Joe MacMoneagle – another alumnus of the RV programme now also working at the Monroe Institute [see FT116: 66] – actually went to the Soviet Union and studied some of the research they’d done on these things and found that it was flawed research, that they had not looked at their data in the correct way, used the correct statistics. So the Russians were very happy that he had looked at it and they re-did the experiments and found that there was no link at all. The things that leaked out – there’s a famous book, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, I think it came out in the Sixties or Seventies – were really thrilling and dangerous. Well, the science behind that turned out to be flawed science. So, at the present time, to my knowledge, there is no concept of direct mental influence.”
But was Atwater party to experiments exploring potential influencing of remote subjects? “We have used with Remote Viewing a form of remote hypnosis. During interrogation, having a remote viewer suggest to the person that’s being interrogated that if he cooperates he’ll get to see his family again. Now, could someone twist that story into a wild tale of mind control? Yes, but those same people would take a psychiatrist and say that the word therapist, when you spell it out, is ‘the rapist’. In my experience this idea of mind-control is mostly fiction and sells books and makes good movies.”
I mention that Atwater’s life now, at the Monroe Institute, seems a far cry from his military career. For him, it was always going to be thus. “I think that in my younger years I was sort of guided into that unit in the military so that I could learn about that. Now I think that the real value of this ESP or Remote Viewing is not in the information that you uncover, not in finding missed children or hidden secrets of the enemy, or missing terrorists for that matter, I think the real value is in self-discovery: who you really are, that you are more, in fact, than your physical body; that you’re interconnected, one with everyone else, in a very unusual way. That you are on a path of evolutionary consciousness and that when you become aware of this you are responsible then for the evolution of your own consciousness.”
It will perhaps come as little surprise that Atwater, like Dr Miller, was raised by “metaphysically oriented parents… What the normal population would consider quite odd was normal in my family. So when I stumbled serendipitously into this programme in the military, it seemed quite natural to me.”
He speaks in incredibly measured tones and seems like a man at home with everything he says and does. He carries his large frame lightly and often talks in homilies, or what seem like pre-prepared spiels.
I become conscious of the fact that whatever I ask him, he seems happy with. This could, I am sure, in another mind become evidence of his influence over the conversation. Occasionally, however, and particularly on questions which refer to proof or evidence, his homilies wander a little.
For example, Atwater’s answer to the admittedly obvious question “is there anything to do with altered states of consciousness that can be empirically verified?” while expressing laudable sentiments, does seem to dodge the issue:
“I understand where your question comes from. I think that the answer is that love is a common experience. I think that people in these various states of consciousness, when they approach their situation with love, they all tend to report the same thing. For example, healing. Healing and love are connected in all instances of reporting. So there is a feeling that that must be a universal truth, that true healing comes from this emotion we identify as love.”
He points out, reasonably, the impossibility of measuring subjective experience and drawing direct lines between brain activity and what is actually appearing in someone’s mind’s eye. He does, however, put great faith in research being undertaken at the Paralabs at Princeton University which does seem to produce measurable results, research into the idea that “when there is some sort of focused awareness of an event happening, subatomic randomness seems to collapse just a little bit.”
“It is as though consciousness itself is affecting the subatomic world,” he says. “Note that I said, ‘as though’. It may not really be that. It may just be that a property of focused consciousness is non-randomness, that they may be co-existent events, not one causing the other.
“We’re interested in that in terms of our group classes here. When we run group classes of 25 people and they’re all intently concentrating on one thing, is that affecting our local random number generators? I’m running random number generators for our programmes to see if that’s happening. Can we recreate that anomaly with smaller groups of people?”
But any hope that we might see these results is also slim. “We don’t have the data yet,” he says. “This is ongoing.”
The idea of collective consciousness is key to the Monroe credo. There is much interest in a particular interpretation of the Jungian idea of archetypes (see FT171:42-47), and specifically light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel type near-death experiences. But a couple of different archetypes, perhaps better referred to as clichés, can be found scattered around the Monroe Institute buildings.
“Dolphins are big here,” explains Dr Miller when I ask her about these. “Rainbows. Crystals. I don’t think it’s any mistake that certain common ones keep coming back and show up here. If we all share this consciousness and there’s something like a dolphin, which represents non-human intelligence, it becomes a symbol for that that’ll pop up wherever appropriate.”
I suggest that the selection of such symbols is at best arbitrary and at worst based on ignorance of what lies behind the symbol in question, with reference particularly to the behaviour of male dolphins, which have been discovered to perpetrate group rapes upon females. Dr Miller isn’t phased. “We don’t like to talk about those. They diminish the spirituality.”
Atwater is slightly more cagey on the New Age clichés. “Because Bob Monroe was a serious businessman himself, the imprint that he left here was that this was not so much ‘woo-woo’ – I don’t know how you’re going to spell that – it’s not airy-fairy, it’s ‘this is the facts the way I discovered them’. We don’t have a doctrine. We don’t wear white robes or eat only tofu. But you will find the occasional crystal out here. People like that kind of thing.”
Indeed, you will find “the occasional crystal” out here. A five-ton monstrosity sits eight feet (2.4m) high in the field below the Nancy Penn Center. Back at the Acorn Inn that night, Martin tells us it was transported from Brazil, at great personal expense, by a Monroe student.
Perhaps the strongest message coming through from both Atwater and Darlene Miller is that ‘the group’ is very important to Monroe Institute programmes.
The idea of group energy and synergy is held aloft like a holy chalice, and this necessarily raises certain questions about the psychology of groups, about what might happen when a group of people intently wants to achieve a prescribed result in terms of their conscious experience.
“Do I think there’s any kind of mass hallucination going on? No, I don’t,” says Dr Miller.
An odd sticker on Atwater’s desk elucidates the behaviour of Monroe groups quite unexpectedly. The sticker reads ‘Ask me about Focus 55’. Mainly because it seems churlish not to, I do ask Atwater about Focus 55.
“This is a cute sticker,” he says. “Bob Monroe assigned number levels for these different windows in consciousness, starting out with 10, 12, 15, 21. Well, there is no such thing as 55. But people get what I call focus envy. They start saying, ‘Well I was in 27’ – ‘Well I was in 36’. And so this always reminds me the numbers don’t always mean anything and a bigger number is not better than a smaller number. They are just arbitrary labels.”
A valley away, past the handful of bars, restaurants and shops that makes up Nellysford, Jim Meissner lives in a ramshackle house surrounded by trailers. In his trailers he keeps his equipment: electronics gear, machine tools, enough solder, nails, screws and wire to fill a hardware store. We’d met Meissner in Bistro 151, a sports bar and pizza joint in Nellysford, the night before we went to Monroe. We’d been chatting to Jane, the bar lady, when Jim had overheard our conversation.
“You guys are here to go to Monroe?”
“Yeah, we’re writing a story about it.”
“You should write a story about me.”
Meissner was in his early sixties, wearing thick-lensed prescription glasses and a stripy short-sleeved shirt with pens in the top pocket, a look immortalised by Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down. But he exuded none of the aggression of Douglas’s character. He was calm, friendly, perhaps a bit of a nerd. And, as he explained that night, he could heal people.
He had been drawn to Nellysford by the Monroe Institute. Following the death of his wife, he’d upped sticks from his home on the West Coast and come to Monroe to show them his invention: a box which took Robert Monroe’s Hemi-Sync technology and amped it up ten-fold. Or so he claimed.
“I used to listen to Bob Monroe’s tapes but they weren’t strong enough for me. So I improved on the Hemi-Sync technology.”
As an electrical engineer specialising in audio engineering, Jim had the skills to do this. He’d made his Brain State Synchronizer and taken it to Monroe and to Atwater. “Skip Atwater called me a snake-oil salesman,” Meissner told me with a hang-dog look. He’d been sent packing, condemned to reside in the next valley and to sell his invention online.
I’d asked Atwater about Meissner. He had remembered him, referring to him as a “Mr Wizard type of guy, an inventor”, and explained that he’d politely passed when offered the invention, having no need for it. But if Meissner’s version of events was true, and Atwater’s comment to him more than a little disingenuous, it wasn’t hard to see why Meissner’s presence might not have been seen as helpful to the smooth operation of the Monroe Institute.
Within minutes of being invited into Meissner’s house, I felt a little uneasy and wondered if Meissner himself might be having second thoughts about seeing us. Perhaps his bravado of the other evening had been fuelled by alcohol. Certainly, he was a little more nervous as he showed us around his messy, cobwebby home, the perfect habitat for a mad inventor.
He made it clear that he would rather I didn’t report certain areas of his research. He was concerned that in so doing I would draw the attention of the Federal Government to his activities, which he didn’t want. He explained why what he was doing represented such a threat to government, particularly the Health Administration. I promised him that I would not report on this research and intend to keep my word.
Suffice it to say, however, that unless I’m very much mistaken, Meissner’s research is in no way illegal, nor indeed of any particular use to anyone but a handful of people who share the same interests as Jim. His speakers are pretty impressive, though.
A lot of jargon is employed at the Monroe Institute. There is much talk of “mental dimensions”, “conducive states of consciousness”, and “realms of hypnagogic imagery”.
It must be hard for those who have undergone what they feel to be consciousness-altering experiences to put such experiences into words, and it is perhaps unavoidable that this sort of jargon has to be employed to pin down concepts larger than words themselves. Nevertheless, by the time we leave I’m not sure I’m any the wiser about consciousness.
Before we did leave, I asked to try out some Hemi-Sync tapes. Atwater put me in the isolation chamber. Protected from electrical radiation and wearing headphones which brought his gentle coaxings to me through the Faraday Cage, I dozed off, listening to the sounds of lapping water and Bob Monroe’s voice as they mixed down into phased tones.
I was in for an hour, apparently, and Atwater and photographer Justin Canning were able to hear my snoring through the microphones. I came out feeling incredibly spacey. I couldn’t say whether it had been any more positive an experience than your average mid-afternoon snooze, but I know I’d need a lot more Hemi-Sync before I could attempt Remote Viewing.
One thing is certain: Bob Monroe has achieved immortality, in a fashion, and proved his theories about life after death.
And it’s not just that the Institute is named after him. His voice lives on in the very fabric of the buildings, piped into the check-in units, the isolation chamber, spooling and spinning on tapes and discs. The Institute is a temple to Monroe, sculpted from the sound of his voice. His benign presence is everywhere. Whether it actually interferes with the video presentation equipment or forms non-corporeal hazes around the check-in units is open to debate. But it is undeniable that he lives on as long as the Institute remains in this beautiful corner of Virginia… and elsewhere, as long as his recordings are played.
Precognition
ESP: PrecognitionPsychic hits and misses By The Hierophant's Apprentice September 2010
Left: Fractal images used in precognition tests.
CSAPP, University of Northampton/David Luke
FT267
Professional psychics become professional because, one might suppose, they are good at their jobs. American tabloids such as the National Examiner, the Sun, the Globe, and the National Enquirer like to gather panels of “top psychics” annually to offer their predictions for the coming year. Just as annually, ‘skeptic’ Gene Emery combs through these predictions at the end of the relevant year to check how accurate the seers have been, and publishes the results in the Skeptical Inquirer. Among their failed predictions for 1997 were the following remarkable non-events, all of which are worthy of the old Mad magazine’s series ‘Scenes We Would Like To See’:
• Pamela Anderson Lee and Howard Stern would star in a rock musical version of Gone With the Wind
• US talk show hostess Kathie Lee Gifford would disappear for five weeks, “setting off a massive search in several countries”. She would be found wandering in the Colorado wilderness, suffering from amnesia after being abducted by space aliens (of course)
• Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, the Duchess of York, would join the cast of Melrose Place and, in real life, marry Calvin Klein
• Madonna would become so concerned about the quality of children’s TV shows she would buy the rights to the Mickey Mouse Club, revive the show and star in it. The Material Virgin would also make a successful run for the US Senate
• Plastic surgeons would discover a way to give dogs the faces of movie stars (that one must have come from the Weekly World News)
• Americans would get a ,000 tax deduction for every career criminal they kill
• Time travel would become as affordable as a Disney World vacation
Notable, and not ‘logically’ predictable, events that actually occurred in 1997 but were unforeseen by America’s psychic finest include: the first appearance of Harry Potter, the birth of the world’s first surviving set of septuplets, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the murder of Gianni Versace, and the discovery of comet Hale-Bopp (to be followed by the Heaven’s Gate cult suicide). And then there was the event that the celebrity-obsessed psychics really should have presaged, but didn’t, the one we all remember – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris.
We try to strike a happy medium in this Dictionary, but in this instance that would be too cruel. Even so, amateurs – indeed people with no claim to psychic powers at all – seem to be better at precognition than the soi-disant professionals. The anecdotal literature is stuffed with tales of ordinary people envisioning future events, perhaps only once in their lives. That one occasion may be crucial to their own or someone else’s continued existence. Two readers of The Unexplained recounted the following cases of that kind in letters to the publication.
PRECOGNITION SAVES LIVES?
Mr Chris Ross of Hove, Sussex, described what happened to his father when driving an ammunition truck in a supply convoy in France in 1944. At the first rest stop, Mr Ross Senior fell asleep in his cab, but woke when he heard the order: “Get that truck out of here, quickly!” He did as he was told, without thinking – but soon stopped when he realised that he alone had started up his lorry and pulled out. Then he saw a pair of Messerschmitt fighters flying through a gap in the nearby hills to attack the convoy. When they flew off, three trucks were out of action and several men had been killed. Grilled by his commander as to why he had driven off, Ross answered that he had simply been obeying orders. He then learned that no such order had been given. But there was a bomb crater precisely where Ross’s lorry had been parked. Had the bomb hit that ammunition truck, many more men – and most likely Ross – would have been dead.
In the second account, a Mr EJ Branwell told how, one day in the late 1970s, he was in Peter Robinson’s store in Oxford Street, London. A young man appeared “as if from nowhere”, racing toward an ‘up’ escalator. Riding on it were two women and a child in a pushchair. The young man leaped up the escalator and, as he got to “within three steps” of the women, the pushchair slipped and the child fell out – into his arms. Astonished onlookers remarked on his lightning reaction. But Mr Branwell, who had seen the man charging toward to escalator, asked: “How can you have a reaction to something that hasn’t happened?”
Since we don’t have the young man’s account of the event, we don’t know if he was simply in a hurry to buy himself a pair of longjohns during a short lunch hour, and his saving the child was the happy result of happening to be in the right place at the right time – a coincidence, in short. Nor do we know if he had seen the pushchair at a distance across the shop floor and realised – either consciously or intuitively – that it was in a precarious position, and then reacted spontaneously to some set of unconscious cues. Or perhaps it was a case of precognition, “a reaction to something that hasn’t happened”.
There may, too, be a non-paranormal explanation for Mr Ross’s escape from death in 1944. If he had particularly acute hearing and was merely dozing, he may well have subconsciously recognised certain near-inaudible low frequencies of the attacking Messerschmitts’ engines. After all, identifying aircraft from their engine notes was a common pastime for schoolboys in World War II – a ‘trick’ with a severely practical application for a soldier in a combat zone. The ‘order’ that woke him is reminiscent of ‘the Voice’ that kept mountaineer Joe Simpson alive after a disastrous accident on Siula Grande, Peru (see Touching the Void, Jonathan Cape 1988, passim).
BOOKIES' NIGHTMARES
A few people have repeated precognitive dreams. As a general rule, these are marked by the irregularity of their occurrence, and a certain imprecision. A celebrated instance is the erratic series of winning horses that appeared in dreams to John Raymond Godley, later the 3rd Baron Kilbracken. These began in March 1946 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Godley dreamt of reading the racing results from the next day’s evening paper: a horse named Brindal and another called Juladin (both names he recognised) had each won their races at odds of 7–1. The following day, he discovered that they were running at Plumpton and Wetherby respectively, but at odds of 5–4 and 5–2. He placed his bets nonetheless, and both horses won. Godley had his last winning dream in 1958. In that dream, What Man won the Grand National. A horse named Mr What was actually on the card; Godley backed it, and it came in at 18–1, netting him £450.
It has to be noted that from early youth Godley was a keen and knowledgeable follower of the turf – at Eton he had been thrashed for setting himself up as the college bookie. His dreams may have been the result of unconscious calculation, working in much the same way as August Kekulé’s revelation of the structure of the benzene molecule came to him in a dream in 1863. What Man was by no means unheard-of among racing cognoscenti, and came third in the National the following year and in 1962. (Worth adding here is a correction to the Godley myth. Most accounts of his intermittent talent maintain that he also dreamed the Grand National Winner in April 1946. The story goes that in Godley’s dream the horse was called Tubermore; Godley bet on the runner with the nearest name, Tuberose, at 100–6. The winner of the National in 1946 was in fact Lovely Cottage, at 25–1.)
It’s a little more difficult to rationalise away the experience of a resolutely anti-gambling man, as recounted by GNM Tyrrell in The Personality of Man (Penguin 1947 (1954), pp78–9):
Mr John H Williams of Dulwich, a Quaker, woke on the morning of the 31st May, 1933, and dozed off again at 8.20 a.m. He then dreamed that he heard the radio announcer giving the names of the first four winners of the Derby, which was to be run that day – Hyperion, King Salmon and two others…”. Between 11 and 11.30 that morning, Mr Williams told three people about his dream. One, a neighbour, was “heard to relate in a restaurant long before the race what I had told him at 11 a.m.” The two others, Mr CA Young and Mr WE Rowland Doughty, gave their signed statements that Mr Williams related to them his dream on the morning of Derby Day… Mr Williams said: “I knew the crystal set was out of order but was so impressed with the seeming reality of the account [in the dream] that I resolved to put the set right and listen at 2 pm. This I did and when the race was proceeding heard the identical expressions and names as in the dream.”
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE LAB
Of all the aspects of extra-sensory perception (ESP), precognition is perhaps the most difficult to test, or at least to identify in tests for ESP. As we’ve noted before, the ‘hits’ in these experiments cannot be attributed with certainty to either telepathy (direct mind-to-mind communication) or to clairvoyance (perception of the general scene, at a distance). Indeed, someone correctly identifying a target picture – say Picasso’s Guernica – in a Ganzfeld ‘telepathy’ experiment might unknowingly be scrying the future in which that picture is revealed as the target. But a number of psi researchers, mindful too of the long-standing suspicion that laboratory conditions inhibit ESP, have been making some sterling efforts to identify precognition experimentally while sidestepping the problem of inhibition.
They recalled that earlier researchers had wondered if the anecdotal evidence suggested that precognition (and other forms of ESP) occurred unconsciously, whereas laboratory experiments demanded conscious attention and concentration – and had obtained mixed results. They had also noted among other findings that, given more than two or three data in making a judgement – say in choosing which car to buy – people tended to make the best choices when not consciously thinking about the problem. The challenge then was to set up an experiment in which the subjects did not know they were being tested for precognitive powers and were not given data-heavy, ‘rational’ decisions to make.
David Luke (now at the University of Greenwich), Chris Roe and others at the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at the University of Northampton in the UK thus set up a double-barrelled test in which subjects were set two sets of tasks but given the impression that the second was the actual ESP test, while the first – the actual test – was simply a warm-up exercise. This asked participants to make an æsthetic judgement as to which of four fractal images they liked most. The images were randomly chosen by computer. Once the subject had made his or her choice, the computer then –and only then – chose one of the four images as the ‘target’. The team considered that a coincidence of images chosen by both the human subject and the computer (after the human had made a choice) would indicate that precognition was at work. Chance alone would produce one in four correct ‘hits’ or 2.5/10. In fact the first series of experiments produced a hit rate of 2.9 (29 per cent), and the second 3.4 (34 per cent), both regarded as significant. A third and a fourth study showed similar results (29 and 28 per cent). Conclusions are, then, that precognition does indeed occur but that it occurs unconsciously and, crucially, this can be demonstrated experimentally.
This work has since been followed up by measuring subjects’ brain activity while making such choices. The event (or decision) itself shows as a major blip in the graphs. But preceding them is a minor blip of highly similar pattern – suggesting that information was registered unconsciously before making its way into ‘normal’ awareness. But this is only a suggestion. A number of questions raise themselves. What, for instance, is the pattern of readouts over a long period before and after the known event? That is, was this noticeable, but minor, blip on the scale a regular event, unrelated to the task set, or an artefact of the machinery? What comparative control experiments have been done? For example, might these minor blips appear moments before someone generates a major blip by, say, making a wisecrack or having a bright idea? (Such things proverbially occur ‘in a flash’ and may be uttered without any conscious thought, not even touching the sides, so to speak.) In other words, are these spikes in the graph indicative of pre-conscious, pre-verbal, but still mundane processes, or of something that one can isolate as specifically ‘paranormal’? Which all amounts to asking how, given the inevitable limitations of the measuring system itself (after all we can’t take photos of thoughts), could we be sure that the apparent anticipation of an event really was related – precognitively – to the event itself? We must wait and see, as Mr Asquith said. Meanwhile, the Northampton researchers should be acknowledged for having found some neat ways around previous limitations and criticisms of investigations of this kind.
DIESEN KUSS DER GANZEN FELD
Dr Rupert Sheldrake takes us to task for feeling superior to the kind of verbiage that was taken as evidence of a ‘hit’ in Ganzfeld experiments we witnessed years ago. His attention and that of readers is hereby directed to the website of the Parapsychological Association, where they may view the following descriptions of target images, which, presumably, we are to take as examples of hits:
1: “I see the Lincoln Memorial… And Abraham Lincoln sitting there… It’s the 4th of July… All kinds of fireworks… Now I’m at Valley Forge… There are fireworks… And I think of bombs bursting in the air… And Francis Scott Key… And Charleston…”
2: “I find flames again… the fire takes on a very menacing meaning… an image of a volcano with molten lava inside… Molten lava running down the side of the volcano… Suddenly I was biting my lip, as though lips had something to do with the imagery… The lips I see are bright red, reminding me of the flame imagery earlier…”
Now try to work out what the target images were.
Answers: (1) George Washington (not mentioned at all in the script). (2) No, not the eruption of Mt St Helens, but a fire-eater (also not mentioned at all). With ‘hits’ like these, who needs misses? [1]
Notes
1 See also:
• 'The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs reality', Skeptical Enquirer, 20.2, March/April 1996
• 'A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent's Laboratory', Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 54, 1987
• 'ganzfeld', The Skeptic's Dictionary
and
• 'New Analyses Raise Doubts About Replicability of ESP Findings', Skeptical Enquirer, 23.6, Nov/Dec 1999
for further discussion of the problems associated with Ganzfeld experiments in practice, and even in theory, and that puts the oft-touted claim of a ‘hit rate’ of 38 per cent for this work under some strain.
Left: Fractal images used in precognition tests.
CSAPP, University of Northampton/David Luke
FT267
Professional psychics become professional because, one might suppose, they are good at their jobs. American tabloids such as the National Examiner, the Sun, the Globe, and the National Enquirer like to gather panels of “top psychics” annually to offer their predictions for the coming year. Just as annually, ‘skeptic’ Gene Emery combs through these predictions at the end of the relevant year to check how accurate the seers have been, and publishes the results in the Skeptical Inquirer. Among their failed predictions for 1997 were the following remarkable non-events, all of which are worthy of the old Mad magazine’s series ‘Scenes We Would Like To See’:
• Pamela Anderson Lee and Howard Stern would star in a rock musical version of Gone With the Wind
• US talk show hostess Kathie Lee Gifford would disappear for five weeks, “setting off a massive search in several countries”. She would be found wandering in the Colorado wilderness, suffering from amnesia after being abducted by space aliens (of course)
• Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson, the Duchess of York, would join the cast of Melrose Place and, in real life, marry Calvin Klein
• Madonna would become so concerned about the quality of children’s TV shows she would buy the rights to the Mickey Mouse Club, revive the show and star in it. The Material Virgin would also make a successful run for the US Senate
• Plastic surgeons would discover a way to give dogs the faces of movie stars (that one must have come from the Weekly World News)
• Americans would get a ,000 tax deduction for every career criminal they kill
• Time travel would become as affordable as a Disney World vacation
Notable, and not ‘logically’ predictable, events that actually occurred in 1997 but were unforeseen by America’s psychic finest include: the first appearance of Harry Potter, the birth of the world’s first surviving set of septuplets, the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the murder of Gianni Versace, and the discovery of comet Hale-Bopp (to be followed by the Heaven’s Gate cult suicide). And then there was the event that the celebrity-obsessed psychics really should have presaged, but didn’t, the one we all remember – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car crash in Paris.
We try to strike a happy medium in this Dictionary, but in this instance that would be too cruel. Even so, amateurs – indeed people with no claim to psychic powers at all – seem to be better at precognition than the soi-disant professionals. The anecdotal literature is stuffed with tales of ordinary people envisioning future events, perhaps only once in their lives. That one occasion may be crucial to their own or someone else’s continued existence. Two readers of The Unexplained recounted the following cases of that kind in letters to the publication.
PRECOGNITION SAVES LIVES?
Mr Chris Ross of Hove, Sussex, described what happened to his father when driving an ammunition truck in a supply convoy in France in 1944. At the first rest stop, Mr Ross Senior fell asleep in his cab, but woke when he heard the order: “Get that truck out of here, quickly!” He did as he was told, without thinking – but soon stopped when he realised that he alone had started up his lorry and pulled out. Then he saw a pair of Messerschmitt fighters flying through a gap in the nearby hills to attack the convoy. When they flew off, three trucks were out of action and several men had been killed. Grilled by his commander as to why he had driven off, Ross answered that he had simply been obeying orders. He then learned that no such order had been given. But there was a bomb crater precisely where Ross’s lorry had been parked. Had the bomb hit that ammunition truck, many more men – and most likely Ross – would have been dead.
In the second account, a Mr EJ Branwell told how, one day in the late 1970s, he was in Peter Robinson’s store in Oxford Street, London. A young man appeared “as if from nowhere”, racing toward an ‘up’ escalator. Riding on it were two women and a child in a pushchair. The young man leaped up the escalator and, as he got to “within three steps” of the women, the pushchair slipped and the child fell out – into his arms. Astonished onlookers remarked on his lightning reaction. But Mr Branwell, who had seen the man charging toward to escalator, asked: “How can you have a reaction to something that hasn’t happened?”
Since we don’t have the young man’s account of the event, we don’t know if he was simply in a hurry to buy himself a pair of longjohns during a short lunch hour, and his saving the child was the happy result of happening to be in the right place at the right time – a coincidence, in short. Nor do we know if he had seen the pushchair at a distance across the shop floor and realised – either consciously or intuitively – that it was in a precarious position, and then reacted spontaneously to some set of unconscious cues. Or perhaps it was a case of precognition, “a reaction to something that hasn’t happened”.
There may, too, be a non-paranormal explanation for Mr Ross’s escape from death in 1944. If he had particularly acute hearing and was merely dozing, he may well have subconsciously recognised certain near-inaudible low frequencies of the attacking Messerschmitts’ engines. After all, identifying aircraft from their engine notes was a common pastime for schoolboys in World War II – a ‘trick’ with a severely practical application for a soldier in a combat zone. The ‘order’ that woke him is reminiscent of ‘the Voice’ that kept mountaineer Joe Simpson alive after a disastrous accident on Siula Grande, Peru (see Touching the Void, Jonathan Cape 1988, passim).
BOOKIES' NIGHTMARES
A few people have repeated precognitive dreams. As a general rule, these are marked by the irregularity of their occurrence, and a certain imprecision. A celebrated instance is the erratic series of winning horses that appeared in dreams to John Raymond Godley, later the 3rd Baron Kilbracken. These began in March 1946 while he was an undergraduate at Oxford. Godley dreamt of reading the racing results from the next day’s evening paper: a horse named Brindal and another called Juladin (both names he recognised) had each won their races at odds of 7–1. The following day, he discovered that they were running at Plumpton and Wetherby respectively, but at odds of 5–4 and 5–2. He placed his bets nonetheless, and both horses won. Godley had his last winning dream in 1958. In that dream, What Man won the Grand National. A horse named Mr What was actually on the card; Godley backed it, and it came in at 18–1, netting him £450.
It has to be noted that from early youth Godley was a keen and knowledgeable follower of the turf – at Eton he had been thrashed for setting himself up as the college bookie. His dreams may have been the result of unconscious calculation, working in much the same way as August Kekulé’s revelation of the structure of the benzene molecule came to him in a dream in 1863. What Man was by no means unheard-of among racing cognoscenti, and came third in the National the following year and in 1962. (Worth adding here is a correction to the Godley myth. Most accounts of his intermittent talent maintain that he also dreamed the Grand National Winner in April 1946. The story goes that in Godley’s dream the horse was called Tubermore; Godley bet on the runner with the nearest name, Tuberose, at 100–6. The winner of the National in 1946 was in fact Lovely Cottage, at 25–1.)
It’s a little more difficult to rationalise away the experience of a resolutely anti-gambling man, as recounted by GNM Tyrrell in The Personality of Man (Penguin 1947 (1954), pp78–9):
Mr John H Williams of Dulwich, a Quaker, woke on the morning of the 31st May, 1933, and dozed off again at 8.20 a.m. He then dreamed that he heard the radio announcer giving the names of the first four winners of the Derby, which was to be run that day – Hyperion, King Salmon and two others…”. Between 11 and 11.30 that morning, Mr Williams told three people about his dream. One, a neighbour, was “heard to relate in a restaurant long before the race what I had told him at 11 a.m.” The two others, Mr CA Young and Mr WE Rowland Doughty, gave their signed statements that Mr Williams related to them his dream on the morning of Derby Day… Mr Williams said: “I knew the crystal set was out of order but was so impressed with the seeming reality of the account [in the dream] that I resolved to put the set right and listen at 2 pm. This I did and when the race was proceeding heard the identical expressions and names as in the dream.”
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE LAB
Of all the aspects of extra-sensory perception (ESP), precognition is perhaps the most difficult to test, or at least to identify in tests for ESP. As we’ve noted before, the ‘hits’ in these experiments cannot be attributed with certainty to either telepathy (direct mind-to-mind communication) or to clairvoyance (perception of the general scene, at a distance). Indeed, someone correctly identifying a target picture – say Picasso’s Guernica – in a Ganzfeld ‘telepathy’ experiment might unknowingly be scrying the future in which that picture is revealed as the target. But a number of psi researchers, mindful too of the long-standing suspicion that laboratory conditions inhibit ESP, have been making some sterling efforts to identify precognition experimentally while sidestepping the problem of inhibition.
They recalled that earlier researchers had wondered if the anecdotal evidence suggested that precognition (and other forms of ESP) occurred unconsciously, whereas laboratory experiments demanded conscious attention and concentration – and had obtained mixed results. They had also noted among other findings that, given more than two or three data in making a judgement – say in choosing which car to buy – people tended to make the best choices when not consciously thinking about the problem. The challenge then was to set up an experiment in which the subjects did not know they were being tested for precognitive powers and were not given data-heavy, ‘rational’ decisions to make.
David Luke (now at the University of Greenwich), Chris Roe and others at the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes at the University of Northampton in the UK thus set up a double-barrelled test in which subjects were set two sets of tasks but given the impression that the second was the actual ESP test, while the first – the actual test – was simply a warm-up exercise. This asked participants to make an æsthetic judgement as to which of four fractal images they liked most. The images were randomly chosen by computer. Once the subject had made his or her choice, the computer then –and only then – chose one of the four images as the ‘target’. The team considered that a coincidence of images chosen by both the human subject and the computer (after the human had made a choice) would indicate that precognition was at work. Chance alone would produce one in four correct ‘hits’ or 2.5/10. In fact the first series of experiments produced a hit rate of 2.9 (29 per cent), and the second 3.4 (34 per cent), both regarded as significant. A third and a fourth study showed similar results (29 and 28 per cent). Conclusions are, then, that precognition does indeed occur but that it occurs unconsciously and, crucially, this can be demonstrated experimentally.
This work has since been followed up by measuring subjects’ brain activity while making such choices. The event (or decision) itself shows as a major blip in the graphs. But preceding them is a minor blip of highly similar pattern – suggesting that information was registered unconsciously before making its way into ‘normal’ awareness. But this is only a suggestion. A number of questions raise themselves. What, for instance, is the pattern of readouts over a long period before and after the known event? That is, was this noticeable, but minor, blip on the scale a regular event, unrelated to the task set, or an artefact of the machinery? What comparative control experiments have been done? For example, might these minor blips appear moments before someone generates a major blip by, say, making a wisecrack or having a bright idea? (Such things proverbially occur ‘in a flash’ and may be uttered without any conscious thought, not even touching the sides, so to speak.) In other words, are these spikes in the graph indicative of pre-conscious, pre-verbal, but still mundane processes, or of something that one can isolate as specifically ‘paranormal’? Which all amounts to asking how, given the inevitable limitations of the measuring system itself (after all we can’t take photos of thoughts), could we be sure that the apparent anticipation of an event really was related – precognitively – to the event itself? We must wait and see, as Mr Asquith said. Meanwhile, the Northampton researchers should be acknowledged for having found some neat ways around previous limitations and criticisms of investigations of this kind.
DIESEN KUSS DER GANZEN FELD
Dr Rupert Sheldrake takes us to task for feeling superior to the kind of verbiage that was taken as evidence of a ‘hit’ in Ganzfeld experiments we witnessed years ago. His attention and that of readers is hereby directed to the website of the Parapsychological Association, where they may view the following descriptions of target images, which, presumably, we are to take as examples of hits:
1: “I see the Lincoln Memorial… And Abraham Lincoln sitting there… It’s the 4th of July… All kinds of fireworks… Now I’m at Valley Forge… There are fireworks… And I think of bombs bursting in the air… And Francis Scott Key… And Charleston…”
2: “I find flames again… the fire takes on a very menacing meaning… an image of a volcano with molten lava inside… Molten lava running down the side of the volcano… Suddenly I was biting my lip, as though lips had something to do with the imagery… The lips I see are bright red, reminding me of the flame imagery earlier…”
Now try to work out what the target images were.
Answers: (1) George Washington (not mentioned at all in the script). (2) No, not the eruption of Mt St Helens, but a fire-eater (also not mentioned at all). With ‘hits’ like these, who needs misses? [1]
Notes
1 See also:
• 'The Evidence for Psychic Functioning: Claims vs reality', Skeptical Enquirer, 20.2, March/April 1996
• 'A Report of a Visit to Carl Sargent's Laboratory', Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 54, 1987
• 'ganzfeld', The Skeptic's Dictionary
and
• 'New Analyses Raise Doubts About Replicability of ESP Findings', Skeptical Enquirer, 23.6, Nov/Dec 1999
for further discussion of the problems associated with Ganzfeld experiments in practice, and even in theory, and that puts the oft-touted claim of a ‘hit rate’ of 38 per cent for this work under some strain.
