The Extrasensory You
In the course of the last fifteen years, I’ve crawled through all the published journals of psychical research and parapsychology published in English and French. I’ve also read several hundred books, looking for descriptions of what was going on in the head of a person experiencing ESP, especially the hard-wired type. My experiences at the ASPR in 1971 stimulated many questions, and one of these was whether or not any previous psychic subjects had experienced the same kind of phenomena I had. At first I expected to find reports detailing how a subject felt while undergoing the psychic experience. But it quickly became apparent that if such reports did exist, they were few and far between.
I could find no catalogue or index heading that made this search easy. So in exasperation, I finally sat down and started with the first journals and proceedings published by the British Psychical Research Society in 1882 and methodically worked my way through them and the publications of the other research groups founded after that date.
Missing in this grand archive is a category of reports detailing what is happening to a subject in his or her own head during the time the ESP experience is taking place. I strongly believe that the head experience of a subject—especially a successful subject—is of primary importance for anyone truly wanting to be in touch with the fundamental workings of the external sensing.
This gaping hole is not noticed until it is pointed out, and then it plunges like a bottomless crevasse in the standard research methods that have been traditionally utilized in parapsychology and its predecessor, psychical research.
Throughout the years, I’ve asked several leading parapsychologists about this omission. Generally they do not consider it an omission, but a matter of form. The form goes something like this: The subject is usually not a trained scientist himself and so cannot be a credible witness to his own inner processes. Only trained researchers detached from the object they are studying can be credible witnesses, even if they have to try to view ESP phenomena secondhand through their detached observations.
Another reason, lurking behind the scenes, is that when some subjects try to volunteer information about their ESP experience, from their point of view, what they say often differs radically from what the researchers think is going on. When this happens, it amounts to label blasting and the entire hypothesis upon which parapsychology is mounted starts quivering accordingly.
Some parapsychologists will interpret these comments in an antagonistic way, insisting that they have been interested in the internal workings of their subjects. To some degree this is true. I, myself, have been asked what I experience during a given experiment. Only four parapsychologists have been truly interested, however, while many of the others seemed to listen to my reports only out of politeness. For the most part, there has been no interest at all. I’ve been very vocal, during my career, about the importance of the subject’s self-experiences. On one occasion, as I was getting ready to travel to act as a subject for J. B. Rhine, I got a telephone report from a friend. During the pre-experiment briefing with his staff, Rhine had pointed out that if they had to listen to my ideas in order to get me to come and act as a subject, everyone was to pretend interest, but that my ideas were not to be listened to otherwise.
The fact remains that in official experimental reports, there is no category entitled “What the subject says he experiences during the ESP experience.” This category should belong in any report of an ESP experiment in which a human has been used as a test subject.
Reporting only on what the experimentor can observe or deduce (the experimentor’s space) is really only half the experiment. What is going on in the subject’s head (the subject’s space) constitutes the other half. Yet after a hundred years, the subject is still being poked and prodded with instruments and research ideas only. This is like finding an obviously animate blob in one’s backyard, poking it with a stick, and then looking first to see what happened to the stick. But the blob might possibly be an extraterrestrial intelligence dropping in. The first line of human response is not to get into communication: “Say, there, can you speak and tell us something?” No, the blob can expect only to get prodded with another stick, somewhat along the lines of the standard human hypothesis that when you find something strange, shoot first and dissect later.
By way of giving an example of the one-sidedness of experimental reports, Dr. Osis published a short informal report of eight consecutive experiments I had taken part in during 1971 and 1972, experiments exactly along the lines of those described in the preceding chapter. Osis and Mitchell were prevented from publishing an official report in their society’s journal because the publishing committee had never encountered such a successful run of experiments and felt that if they published the results officially, the society would suffer undue attacks from skeptics.
In the general outrage that followed the handing down of this decision, Osis resorted to publishing his report in the ASPR Newsletter, No. 14, Summer 1972.
Osis gives the results from a blind judging of the eight sets of experimental materials (rejudged five times thereafter) as being statistically relevant (as “the likelihood of getting 8 out of 8 by chance is 1 in approximately 40,000”). He then talks about perception achieved during the experiments, whether or not OOB (out-of-body) vision follows the laws of optics. He then goes into physiology: “What is happening to Ingo Swann’s body at the time when he feels his spiritual self to be somewhere else?” and he describes what my brainwaves were seen to be doing during the experiment.
Nowhere in this brief report does he mention the fact that it was the shift from verbalizing to picture drawing that was the key ingredient for achieving the eight significant results. And nowhere in this report is there any mention of what was going on in the subject’s space while these remarkable results were being achieved. In short, save for its brevity and its appearance in the Newsletter, it is a standard report.
Separating the researcher’s observational space from the subject’s active psychic space serves only to bring about a trenchant artificiality into the entire proceedings. Common sense indicates that if the subject’s psychic space holds the key to any deeper understanding of the extrasensory processes, then there ought to be a very close and intimate sharing of that space between subject and researcher.
I’ve come to term the person’s psychic space as “the extrasensory you” or “the extrasensory me,” if you like. Only by becoming aware of the extrasensory you can you start to locate the processes that are taking place in your ESP core, which is deeply buried in the ESP mind mound. If you want to begin taking control of your externalizing abilities, some focus has to be applied to how the internal mechanisms are working, in addition to what is trying to be sensed.
The rest of this book will make all this a little easier for you, if you make the effort to try your own simple ESP experiments. But the concept of the extrasensory you is of primary importance, and to acknowledge its existence is a good portion of our reorientation about ESP abilities in general.