The Influence of Disbelief and Trusting the Deeper Self
As you go about trying to locate your own ESP core potentials, you should understand, in advance, that what you believe about the existence of psychic talents can play a part in your ultimate success.
If an individual’s ESP mind mound has a bunch of rubbish and ideas on it that tell him extrasensory perception and external sensing do not exist, then that individual might have difficulty in experiencing the nature of his own psychic nucleus. He has a psychic nucleus whether he likes the idea or not, but the acquired learning of his consciousness can suppress any hint of it.
Imagine the following scene. A disbeliever’s ESP core tries to send upward into consciousness a bit of second-reality information that may be beneficial to the disbeliever. His consciousness and its acquired patterns can’t tolerate this and hastily marshal a group of bits from consciousness that rush downward to obliterate the incoming psychic information. It’s much like the white cells in the bloodstream rushing to collect around and destroy a foreign virus or bacterium. The white blood cells are part of a natural defense system. If it is true that all humans possess a psychic nucleus and an ESP core, then the conscious defense system against incoming psychic information is, to some degree, unnatural, sort of a culturally induced immunization against psychic experience.
Disbelief has certain powers over an individual’s thought processes and over how he responds to events in the world around him. A person who disbelieves something seldom sees facts attesting to the inaccuracy of the disbelief. The old adage that people see only what they want to see is frequently true, and especially regarding psychic talents—even their own psychic talents.
Many of the greatest detractors of psychical research are those individuals who have admitted that if psychic talents truly exist, then their entire world view will be proved wrong. What they are referring to, of course, is not reality as it remains to be discovered by advancing science. New realities are being uncovered all the time. They are referring to a balance of their individual reality, a mental balance made up of acquired experience and learning (or mislearning).
Unless these critics can prove that they know everything that is to be known, they are out of order in rejecting the realities of ESP and its related phenomena. The evidence substantiating their reality is just too abundant and too profound. Nonetheless, the critics’ realities are their realities, and for them, ESP truly does not exist. This is a reality. It involves only the disbeliever, not the psychic nuclei of all other humans. And that is another reality.
If you think about it, there can be no such thing as opposing realities. What is real is, simply, real. If people think two realities oppose each other, then there is something wrong with one or both those “realities.”
There is no evidence for “opposing realities” in the natural universe or the cosmos. In fact, the natural universe and the cosmos exhibit a highly refined harmony of realities, the nature of which has only recently begun to astonish cosmologists. Some of the components of this harmony might seem cruel, such as all life forms having to devour other life forms (lions eating gazelles, for example) in order to survive. But behind those apparent cruelties lie the greater harmonies of the ecosystem.
Man appears to be the only life form that artificially creates realities, and these pseudorealities often do oppose each other. Frequently they are constructed so that they exclude many things that are actually real.
If an individual’s mind is strongly structured against the existence of ESP, it is easy to assume he will not like to see it emerge in himself—or in others. An individual who is benignly disposed toward the existence of ESP will stand a better chance of it emerging when he attempts a psychic test. This has proved to be the case under rigorous research in which both believers and disbelievers in ESP have been tested.
Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, one of America’s leading parapsychologists, is also an insightful person who can identify closely with the human problems of ESP. She has, during her long career, conducted many unprejudiced experiments about the basic nature of psychic talents and authored many seminal papers and books on the subject.
As early as 1945, Dr. Schmeidler took an interest in the question of how believers and disbelievers would score on ESP tests. She labeled the believers “sheep” and the disbelievers “goats.” She published her first paper, “Separating the Sheep from the Goats,” in 1945, in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. As a result, the sheep-goats hypothesis came into vogue as a general concept in parapsychology relating to the effect of belief and attitude to success in ESP scoring.
Dr. Schmeidler conducted lengthy, well-controlled experiments, by first dividing her subjects into two groups. The averaging of the ESP scores demonstrated that the sheep scored better than the goats did. The average scoring differences were small, but Dr. Schmeidler’s data base was large enough to make the difference statistically significant.
Some of the individual sheep actually scored relatively high, while many of the goats scored quite low. Later similar experiments by others confirmed these findings, and the hypothesis that believers in ESP generally fare better in designed ESP tests has now become commonplace in parapsychology. I think we can concede that disbelief, if it is truly strong, can have a devastating effect over the natural and spontaneous workings of one’s own psychic nucleus and ESP core.
We should also bear in mind that, from available statistics, the true disbeliever is in the distinct minority. Approximately 80 percent or better of the population believe in the existence of ESP, and even in academia—normally strongly structured against ESP—samples show that probably as much as 60 percent accept the probability of ESP, and another 20 percent are waiting for it to be proved.
Thus, activation of the ESP core might be simple for some, harder for others, and perhaps virtually impossible for the few that have acquired a cultural immunization against ESP and the workings of their own psychic nucleus.
Trusting the Deeper Self
Most of us have a good ideal of familiarity with our minds, even though we may not know or understand the latest psychological labels for its different parts. If we are honest, these parts are frequently an unruly lot. Few and far between are those individuals who can bring discipline into the whole show. What usually happens is that we bring discipline into those areas of our minds that are important to us, sometimes only after experience has demonstrated the painful desirability for doing so.
Getting along with one’s peers and “making it” in life require mental self-discipline in several areas. Mental self-discipline is the factor that brings one into phase (into coherence) with whatever one wishes to take part in and succeed in doing.
The upward creative life is actually a series of cooperations, as any self-achiever understands, but self-discipline is the prerequisite for any cooperation. Conversely, the downward destructive life has its basis in a lack of self-discipline, the result of which is that the individual is always at odds not only with himself, but with life around him.
There are probably many types of self-discipline; but for the purpose of this book, four seem to be important. Discipline is a product of training, of focusing, of experience, and of intuition. The first three can be derived from learning and education and concern those areas where a lot of information is available to us. We can model ourselves after the elements of that information and discipline ourselves by doing so.
In areas where not much information is available to us, we have to resort to intuition alone. At the present time, the state of the art concerning extrasensory perception provides little in the way of dependable information about it. Any developed psychic that emerges in our present culture has learned to cooperate with his or her psychic nucleus and the raw core ESP processes that emerge from it. But this learning, and the self-disciplines that accompany it, is more intuitive than anything else.
There is a model that can help make this more clear. I’ve used the analogy of the mind mound. We all possess several different kinds of mind mounds, as, for example, one we might call the creativity mind mound. At its center is the creativity core, or the creativity nucleus. Like the psychic nucleus, the creativity nucleus is probably part of the deeper self.
Any achieved creator—whether artist, inventor, ecologist, or businessperson—has intuitively learned to cut through the rubbish and contact the core. The creativity core seems to work on its own and works best without too much deliberate intervention by our patterns of consciousness. The achieved creator has learned, intuitively, to accommodate the elements and needs of the creativity core, and to discipline the elements of consciousness that might tend to interfere with it.
High-stage creativity is almost always as spontaneous as high-stage ESP. What the artist or inventor has learned to do is to allow the core to function without imposing rational consciousness upon it to any detrimental degree.
This situation has been expressed in different ways by many highly achieved individuals. The noted physicist, Louis de Broglie, remarked that intuition enables us to perceive all at once some profound aspect of reality by a kind of inner light that has nothing to do with laborious deductive schemes consciousness might wish to impose. The French chemist, Louis Pasteur, upon his admission to the Academie des Sciences in Paris, made a speech which must have seemed audacious to his more rationalistic colleagues. Among other things, he noted:
The more valuable notions that the human mind possesses are all in darkness, in the background. If we were cut off from this background, the exact sciences themselves would be stripped of the greatness which derives from the secret affinity between them and other truths of infinite scope that we are beginning dimly to apprehend, and which constitute a link with the mystery of creation.
When an individual allows himself to be dominated solely by those elements that consciousness holds, that same consciousness is quite likely to filter out impressions, information, and perceptions coming in from places other than through his frontal consciousness.
This problem can be quite severe. Psychotherapists are very familiar with how difficult it is to get the unconscious to disgorge some content that consciousness has repressed in the first place. In those cases in which creativity and ESP are being suppressed, the individual has little chance of penetrating the cores and instituting the mental disciplines necessary for their fulfillment.
Most of us live without much direct communion with our deeper self, which is therefore relegated into a condition of trying to shove bits and pieces of information upward into consciousness. Consciousness then deals with these bits and pieces in ways characteristic of the individual.
The individual who intuitively learns to accommodate the larger deeper self—and to self-discipline consciousness accordingly—is a receiver of information. In fact, the deeper self can completely resolve issues that consciousness is involved with but cannot resolve on its own. The amount of evidence for this is huge. Musicians have seen completed scores, inventors completed inventions, artists completed paintings or sculptures, mathematicians completed formulae, and so forth, all in the flick of a moment during which conscious involvement attenuated and allowed the deeper self to shove upward the completed problem.
The same is true for spontaneous high-stage ESP. There are thousands of reports where individuals have received complete information about distant events with a clarity that is visual, sensual, and intellectual all at once. The normal barriers against this kind of intrusion go down temporarily. As some have put it, the normal meshes in the net of consciousness are capable of enlargement, and widen upon these occasions.
Whatever the case may be, the problem is not so much developing one’s extrasensory perceptions, as learning how to prevent interference with them.
The developed psychic has learned to do this intuitively; to switch gears, so to speak, to shift focus from consciousness to a communion with his or her deeper self and the elements of the psychic nucleus and its ESP core. In other words, the developed psychic creates an unimpeded pathway from the deeper self to conscious awareness in which the incoming psychic information can be perceived with relative clarity.
In psychic parlance, this is often referred to as “focusing.” But focusing is only one half of the picture. Focusing should mean to bring into alignment the elements of consciousness that are necessary to create the pathway (or aperture) through which the psychic information travels upward to conscious perception.
The other half of the situation involves establishing a communion between the deeper self and the self as a whole. If what advanced physicists and thinkers are hypothesizing is true, that the deeper self is already interconnected to universal information (as discussed earlier in this book), then the deeper self doesn’t need to be developed or focused. It needs only to be afforded the opportunity to deliver.
The developed psychic has learned to intuitively trust the deeper self, and has self-disciplined the avenues in the mind that can convey the information upward into consciousness.
I think we can say, with some insight now, that it takes a modicum of ESP to enlarge one’s extrasensory potentials. After all, intuition is itself a variety of ESP. Locating the barriers to ESP seems to require ESP itself. Aside from this, we can see that ESP does not go on in consciousness. It is not a product of consciousness, and in fact, undisciplined patterns in consciousness only interfere with it.
Extrasensory perception’s environment lies in those areas beneath consciousness where psychic information is preprocessed and emerges in a completed form.
When focusing and communion are in order, an ESP target can emerge into consciousness in a relatively unhampered form, as we have seen via the picture drawings. Anyone interested in contacting their ESP core now has to turn his or her attention to the preconscious processes and those elements of consciousness that are likely to degrade correct transmission of the incoming psychic information.
As it turns out, picture drawings are an excellent way of doing this. Picture drawings themselves reveal what has happened to psychic information as it passes upward into consciousness. One of the good things we can say about consciousness is that it can learn, provided it can be made to understand exactly what it is supposed to learn. Your own picture drawings will show the way.