A New Stage for ESP
I think we can all agree on one thing: Every system has bugs. Bugs—those invisible critters—are what cause a system to break down. If something has too many bugs, it won’t work at all.
If you try to make a bugged-up system work, you will probably end up pulling your hair out and gnashing your teeth. What is needed is a debugger. It’s actually a very venerable but little acknowledged profession. The smart debugger keeps behind the scenes because he knows that any system designed by the high-powered brains of man cannot admit to having bugs. That would make the brain less than glorious, a state none of us likes to focus on for too long. So debuggers work to discover unexpected defects, faults, flaws, or imperfections. Then, the system starts working again. Often it is a new system altogether.
Dr. Jan Ehrenwald, a parapsychologist and scholar who has spent a lifetime studying the intricacies of ESP, has described parapsychology as:
a systematic inquiry into such out-of-the-ordinary occurrences as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and precognition which, until recently, have largely remained outside the pale of science. Parapsychology, therefore, is supposed to represent a new frontier of psychology, seeking to advance man’s knowledge of himself into unknown territory. Yet parapsychology does not break entirely new ground…. Jan Ehrenwald, The ESP Experience, Basic Books, New York 1978, p. 3.
Parapsychology (and its predecessor, psychical research) has been around for a little over a hundred years. Psychic abilities have been hunted madly during this time—alas, to little avail. While the mathematical system taken altogether shows that ESP does exist, none of ESP’s larger, more productive issues have come to light. Its basic components are still elusive. After a hundred years of seeking, parapsychologists are embarrassed, while skeptics are jubilant.
It is a strange situation. We all know, personally, that extrasensory perception does exist. Spontaneous ESP keeps happening, on a rather large scale, but parapsychologists just can’t get a handle on it. At the same time, parapsychology frequently harvests rigorous resistance from sources outside itself. This is understandable if you realize that parapsychology and what it represents constitutes the bugs in several other science systems that have been designed without including the realities of ESP and psi. [Psi is a Greek letter used by parapsychologists to embrace all unusual mental phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and unusual physical phenomena such as psychokinesis (movement of objects without physical contact). It was first used as an acronym to replace the word “psychic” which was scientifically unpopular, but in the 1950s came to be accepted as a word in itself.] People cling to their systems. Many antipsychic authorities have admitted publicly that if psychic things are proved true, then their systems will be wrong. So we can see where the resistance comes from.
But does this explain parapsychology’s general lack of progress? Parapsychologists themselves admit unofficially that progress seems to be dragging its feet. Few and far between are those who will officially proclaim the total existence of any particular psychic phenomenon. They insist they are still studying them. It doesn’t take much to understand that the lack of proclamation corresponds to the lack of trenchant discovery. Now, after a hundred years of diligent effort, the time is drawing near when parapsychology will have to start looking for the bugs in the very systems it is employing to track down the paranormal.
Extrasensory perception is like the enormous shifting dunes of sand in a desert, always changing, soft, and fluid. Perhaps it will be seen that parapsychology has been trying to negotiate these dunes with horses, whose sharp hooves sink into the sand, when all along they should have been riding camels, whose big soft foot pads are perfect for desert travel.
This analogy helps us grasp the fundamental issue that continues to hang over a progressive future development of extrasensory perception as a reality within ourselves. It also helps us comprehend Dr. Ehrenwald’s penetrating insight when he says:
The question is, to what extent can the experimental evidence be regarded as a duplication in the laboratory of ESP phenomena as they are encountered spontaneously, “in the raw,” under conditions of ordinary life…. We have to ask whether … cultivating the “small fry” that can be observed in the ESP laboratory, does not run the risk of losing sight of the “big game” of major psi occurrences of the type which have struck man’s mind with wonder and awe from the dawn of history? It may be that by opening our door by little more than a tiny crack, we bar the entrance into our purview of all but a few flattened out microscopic slices off a lost psychic reality. [Ibid., p. 11]
New facts and ideas are often alien to the way we are used to thinking about things. Any author presenting something new is obliged to set a stage that uses familiar references to help illuminate the unfamiliar.
When it comes to extrasensory perception, setting the stage is difficult for two reasons that are important.
ESP Is Elusive
The phenomena we label “extrasensory” are not very well understood even after a hundred years of researching them. There are few normal standards that can be used to help.
Parapsychology has given sufficient clinical testing to the phenomena so that it is practically impossible to deny they exist. The proof is actually quite colossal. But the mechanisms that cause ESP to function have remained invisible and elusive so that there is only minimal contact with what actually underlies the various ESP phenomena.
An additional difficulty is that ESP cannot be studied objectively—that is, as something outside ourselves. It arises from places in our overall mental makeup that are not visible to our normal consciousness. It surfaces in ways that are not logical compared to the usual ways we interpret things.
Extrasensory events do not concretize themselves very well, at least under the methods of exploration that have been used so far. They fade in and out of our awarenesses and minds leaving little behind as tangible evidence that they were even there. This often leaves even the most devoted believers in ESP with the futile feeling that they are chasing shadows that are constantly moving, with nothing that can be seen to cast the shadows in the first place. As a result, extrasensory perception has never achieved a normalized status—even within parapsychology, the science that studies the phenomena.
ESP Is Covered with “labels” That May Be False
If the invisible and intangible nature of ESP is not enough to cause continual confusion, the terms we use to describe these invisibles have become set in cement.
The terms “extrasensory perception (ESP),” “telepathy,” “clairvoyance,” “precognition” and so forth have long been common concepts and household words, even though no one really knows for sure exactly what they stand for.
Using the word “telepathy” as an example, we can get some idea of the problems involved.
Telepathy is variously defined as direct mind-to-mind communication, or communication from one mind to another through other than normal sensory channels.
Something like what is implied by these definitions might indeed eventually turn out to be true. But right now there is absolutely no evidence at all to support those definitions.
The best that can be said is there are instances in which two or more minds seem to be in some kind of rapport with each other, in which what is in one mind can appear in the other’s. It is only an assumption that one mind is “sending” directly to another mind, which is “receiving.” Yet terms and definitions like this one have been accepted as valid conceptions when, in reality, they are only labels that represent something we think might exist. In other words, something that is invisible and whose basic elements are totally unknown has been given a label to describe it as if it truly exists.
It is worthwhile digging into the word “telepathy” to demonstrate how it became the label it did. When the word was coined in 1882 by F. W. H. Myers, the basic idea was to link up distance (tele-) with empathy—telepathy. It was meant as a name for an apparent fact—“a coincidence between two persons’ thoughts which requires a causal explanation”—and it was defined as a “transmission of thought independent of the recognized channels of sense.” Myers presupposed that the term involved no attempt at explanation, yet it was soon construed as such.
A decade before, electromagnetic radiation had been discovered, and soon radioactive emissions were confirmed. Telepathy collected around it the concepts of radiations and emissions. It was assumed that a mind could also radiate and emit, and the something radiated or emitted was being “sent” across a distance, where it was received, like a radio, by another mind. The invisible-unknown elements of telepathy were compared to and modeled after radiations and emissions. The comparison was accepted for, after all, it seemed to fit.
It is now known that telepathy can take place in environments impervious to all known forms of radiation or emissions, so the radiation-sending theory is a bust. Yet we continue to think of telepathy as if we know it works that way. As long as our concepts are trapped in that special label, we are unlikely to think of telepathy in any other way.
Our concepts (and consequently our heads) are glued together with many labels of this kind which refer only to things we think we know. All this label glue can be referred to as the “representational universe.” As long as we continue to think of things as we have only chanced to represent them to ourselves, the real facts of the unknown will remain invisible and unrecognized.
All psychic phenomena are cloaked with labels such as this, and parapsychology struggles valiantly within them.
Fitting New Facts and Ideas into Old Labels
The question immediately arises: Can new facts and ideas about ESP fit into its old labels? The reason for considering this question at all is that labels, once accepted in dictionaries and as household words, continue to have power over the ways we think about them.
This question has incredible importance upon what is to follow in the rest of this book. For example, in 1971 when I first volunteered as a psychic test subject, I tried to evoke my telepathy, clairvoyance, and out-of-body perceptions through the labels as I (then) conceived them. The results were negative and emotionally quite humiliating.
Based upon these first results, the only possible and logical conclusion would have been that I did not possess ESP at all, and that would have been the end of it. Yet I could not believe that, since there were many cases of ESP frequently demonstrated. Contrasting these early failures were events in my life that seemed to me obviously extrasensory in nature. So what was wrong?
If you read a few basic books on what is known about how the mind functions (which I immediately did), the results can be very illuminating. As Lawrence Hinkle, Jr., has pointed out:
The brain, the organ that deals with information, also organizes its responses on the basis of information previously fed into it. This information, in the form of a personality developed through the experience of a lifetime, as well as immediate attitudes and the awareness of the immediate situation, conditions the way the brain will react to a given situation. [L. E. Hinkle, Jr., in “The physiological state of the interrogation subject as it affects brain function,” in The Manipulation of Human Behaviour, Albert B. Biderman and Herbert Zimmer (eds.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1961, pp. 33-34.]
As I considered this insight, it gradually became clear that spontaneous ESP events (which I had experienced often, and which most other people do also) were something quite different from the way my intellectual learning was thinking about them.
Spontaneous ESP events occurred by themselves via rules and logic of their own (usually taking normal intellectual consciousness by surprise). But when I tried to evoke an ESP event by using my intellectual understanding of ESP as a basis (the information previously fed in), nothing happened. Using the word “telepathy” did not trigger mind-to-mind contact nor did using the word “clairvoyance” trigger much clairvoyance, nor did trying to move intellectually into an “altered state” provide much help. (After all, which altered state should one move into?)
I was able to conclude (correctly so) that ESP must work and function on its own by mechanisms not recognizable to my brain learning, even though I possessed lots of labels that served me intellectually. There was no direct connection between these labels and real ESP mechanisms. To put this another way, my labels served as filters or barriers to true real ESP experience! The labels were acting as mental preconceptions about what should be experienced intellectually, when in reality (as it turned out) these preconceptions were the night side to ESP’s day-side mechanisms. It was only after I learned to detach myself from the power of these labels that some of ESP’s mechanisms revealed themselves.
In answer to the question as to whether or not new facts and ideas about extrasensory perception can be fit into its old labels, my supposition (based on sixteen years of in-depth experience) is that this fitting will be minimal. We have to prepare ourselves to view the actual mechanisms of ESP quite independent of the old labels, if for no other reason than they have not proved themselves after one hundred years.
The Major Backdrop of the New Stage—People Are Not the Dumb Animals They Are Often Thought to Be
All the above considered, setting a new stage on which to consider extrasensory perception is not an enviable task. On one hand we have the invisible unknowns. On the other, we have ingrained and accepted labels that allow us intellectually to think we know what we are dealing with, but actually do not.
In this book, I want to introduce a number of concepts such as “mind mound,” “mind manifesting,” “the ESP core,” and “penetrating the ESP core,” all of which will describe elements of extrasensory perception in a new way. But none of these concepts can effectively be understood unless we go beneath the already-existing labels and find a new cutting edge for a novel comprehension of how the extrasensory processes are actually working.
In casting about for where this cutting edge might lay, I’ve decided to appeal to the generally shared human attribute for experiencing.
I’m of the opinion that people are not the dumb animals sometimes posited by academia and science. In life, self-experience is the one valid common denominator for reality. It is far more important than labels, which are often illusory. People might be quite uneducated when it comes to understanding what labels mean or imply and feel themselves to be inferior to someone who can adroitly manipulate them. In the long run, people who are dominated by labels and have little self-experience about what they actually mean are probably the least truly educated.
Self-experience is the only way to know true reality. It is self-experience that leads to common sense, which is always superior to label manufacturing. In fact, self-experience and enlightenment go hand in hand.
This is especially true of ESP. Extrasensory perception has one strong dominant feature that has been ignored. Like eating, sleeping, having sex, or thought imaging, it is always an experience and never just a label. It may be a giddy, unnerving, confusing, or sublime experience, but an experience it is. In other words, all the known forms of ESP are psychic-metabolic functions of one kind or another that deliver themselves up into consciousness as self-experience.
True extrasensory perception cannot be contacted in the representational universe using only the labels we have arbitrarily assigned to it. It can be contacted only in the experiential universe—and then only within its own terms and rules.
So the new stage I’d like to set for ESP is one that has self-experience as the major prerequisite for any real understanding of ESP functioning.