Taking the Plunge into Core ESP
An eagle does not make up its mind to fly: it plunges into the void and finds itself flying.
Setting Up Your Own Experiments
In setting up your own experiments, my first word of advice is to keep it simple. The simpler the experiment, the easier it will be to achieve a meaningful result.
In parapsychology, many experiments have become so complex that they probably serve to inhibit good results. In my own experience I’ve found that people try to overcomplicate things they don’t understand very well in the first place.
The experiment and the steps you will go through should be well in your mind before you start. I’ve found that the ESP core processes function better when they know what will be expected of them. The typical steps are as follows:
Materials You Will Need
You will need some standard white paper. Be sure it is unlined paper, having nothing on it that will distract your attention or activate some unpredictable mental artistic activity. If the paper has lines on it, the lines tend to “drive” the spontaneous drawing into making lines. Colored paper can also help distort an accurate response. You will need a quiet atmosphere. Take the phone off the hook and turn off the radio or stereo. Use a flat table with a good light. Sit up straight in a comfortable chair. Use a sharp pencil or a narrow-tipped pen.
Selecting a Friend to Work With
Selecting the friend to work with is probably of some importance. Try to find one who is genuinely interested in the experiment, and who is not antagonistic to the idea of ESP. At an extrasensory level, emotions and attitudes actually do communicate quite easily between two people. If the friend you select is not in harmony with you or with the experiment, this “information” might become incorporated into your result and degrade it a little. Don’t try working with someone who teases you or kibitzes. It’s best to have someone who will trade off with you, letting you select objects for him while he tries to activate his own ESP core.
Types of Objects That Should Be Used
At first, these objects should be those that are easy to recognize. Bear in mind that the less information your ESP core has to process, the easier the task will be. To our eyes, all objects are more or less familiar and easy to recognize. But the ESP core processes bits and pieces of information, and the more of these there are about the target, the more difficult the effort will be. If you use a complicated target right at first, you will probably experience a confusion of bits and pieces of information.
For example, it is better to start with a single spoon rather than a whole box of silverware, a simply designed vase or jar rather than one that is elaborate with a lot of designs and pictures painted on it, a simple strand of pearls rather than a necklace that is made of lots of stones and a complicated design.
Maintaining Silence
Try to avoid any excessive talking or other bothersome little noises that might distract your attention. If you can arrange it, have a little bell your friend can ring when the object is ready. This helps eliminate any unintentional cueing that might occur through voice contact. This method is desirable in formal ESP testing but, in my opinion, not completely necessary. After all, you are not deliberately going to cheat. You will not have to.
Doing the Experiment
The basic picture drawing experiment is simplicity itself. When you feel you are ready, remain alone in one room and ask your friend to place the simple object on a table in another room. If another room is not available, the object can be placed in a closed box, or simply behind a barrier that you can’t see through.
Sit up at a well-lighted table with your paper in front of you. Put the date and time on your paper.
Calm yourself; don’t be nervous. Maintaining calmness might not be possible for the first few experiments. We tend to anticipate, get worked up, feel we are going to fail, or feel that we are “hot” and will get the target right away. It might take a few trials to bring about a detached poise, a sort of disinterest. When you can achieve this, the core ESP processes will work their best. This calming procedure doesn’t mean that you have to spend a half hour preparing yourself, trying to put yourself into a semitrance. Try to treat the experiment like you would any other task that involves all your attention for a few moments.
When all is ready, let your ESP core do the work for you. Bear in mind that the ESP information is partly gut feeling, partly intuition, and partly a sort of automatic response that does not actively engage your conscious mental processes.
If you find yourself thinking about what the target might be, take a break, and start over again. When you draw something, don’t start wondering what the drawing might represent because you will immediately experience a flood of possibilities.
Practically everyone will be a little self-conscious at first. Various kinds of emotions can surface as you begin to touch your ESP mind mound. A good way of causing them to dissipate is to note them down on your paper. Doing so will give you a record of how you feel as you try to activate your ESP core processes.
If you feel like putting words into your response, do so. After all, some attributes of a target cannot easily be sketched, such as textures, emotional feelings about the target, or the overall ambience of the target.
Ending Your Attempt
It has been my experience that the core ESP processes work fast. Don’t be surprised if you make a quick few brief lines or a small drawing in a very short period of time. The ESP processes work this way. If you prolong your effort, trying to “do better,” you will probably only be activating mental processes that will degrade the original psychic information. Knowing when to end the experiment is a matter of intuition coupled with experience. After a few experiments, you will get the feel of it.
Asking for immediate Feedback
When you intuitively feel that your drawing has “fulfilled” itself, put your pen down and ask to see the target.
Compare the elements of your drawing with the elements of the target. After a few attempts, when your self-consciousness has calmed down, and you feel you are getting the hang of it, you will begin to note the specifics of the information through, and your whole ESP system will begin learning.
You might want to circle (with a red pen) the points or features of your picture drawing that correspond to the target or something in it. For example, if the target was a small square box, and you drew an angle or two, you would want to note that the angularity of the target was coming through. If the target was a pencil, and you drew one straight line, you would want to note that. If the target was a curved vase, and you drew a curve or a roundish thing, then you would want to note that you were in the ballpark.
If you do achieve a good representation of the target, be prepared for a flush of excitement—the ESP impact mentioned earlier in this book.
Comparing Your Drawing to Information in This Book
It will be important for you to study your drawings in the light of how they compare with the information in this book, especially the elements that contribute to errors, as discussed in Chapter 12. The ESP core processes seem to “learn” from this type of comparison and reinforcement. If you do an intellectual analysis of your attempt, you will find that your picture drawings will gradually improve, sometimes considerably so.
Pacing Your Experiments
General experience in parapsychology has shown that doing numerous experiments closely together seems only to collapse the fragile ESP core processes. It is best to do only one or two at a time, and then take a break of a day or two. Treat your experiments as you would any training experience. Go easy at first, and only gradually build up to the long, hard stuff. There is a natural urge in all of us to want to work hard and fast to develop a skill or talent. Bear in mind that talents and skills accumulate slowly, at some pace governed by our own internal mechanisms. ESP is no different. After a dozen or so experiments, you will find your own pace.
Types of Experiments
Using an object on a table in another room might get boring for you after a while. There are many variations you can enjoy, as suggested below.
But a word of caution. The whole point of doing any experiment is to produce a picture drawing. For far too long, ESP has been treated as a mentalist thing. That is, the subject focused on something and then used his or her conscious mind to figure out what the psychic information was. This technique put the psychic information exactly in that area that is also the source of most of the “noise” or misunderstanding (“error contributions”), i.e. consciousness.
What you are after is more contact with those areas beneath consciousness, those areas closer to the ESP core and its processes. These lie deeper in you, in areas that will be at first unfamiliar. Your own ESP core will produce the picture drawings for you, frequently without the aid or understanding of consciousness.
The ESP core and its processes are subtle systems. It is these you want to contact—not your conscious mental awareness. All too often I’ve seen people struggling to become psychic solely and only in their conscious minds. They make a conscious attempt to comprehend incoming psychic information, and more likely than not this is not much more than a guess.
Even more importantly, by not making a picture drawing, they have no chance at all to see how their ESP core and its processing systems are working. The picture drawing is much more than just a sketch of your conscious impressions. You will find that the picture drawing sort of draws itself, frequently without any decision-making characteristic or consciousness.
The incoming ESP information can get lost in the quagmires of consciousness. It gets added to, manipulated, thwarted, occluded, changed. The semiautomatic picture drawing undercuts all these complications. The picture drawing provides both a record of your experiments, and will show you which information the ESP core is coping with, and which information it is not.
As you will see, the picture drawing is a type of ESP language that deals with basic form-shape attributes of a given target. These basic form-shapes cannot be processed very well by conscious thinking or word descriptions alone, because in doing so, the basic form-shapes are translated into another type of presentation. It is in the translation processes that error contributions occur.
Your ESP core will not learn anything by this mental method. It will learn from its own picture drawings.
As long as you have a pad and pencil or pen with you, you can do any kind of experiment—but remember to keep your first experiments as simple as you can.
When the object-on-a-table experiment gets boring, your friend can put something in his pocket or in a box. You, yourself, can go into the street and try to “see” what is in the window of a store around a corner.
You can have a friend in a distant city work with you. Have him put something on the table in front of him. The only disadvantage to this is that you will not be able to have immediate feedback, and so you will not be able to compare your picture drawing to the actual target. But you can send your response to your friend, who can note which elements in it are correct or not.
Practically everything in the gigantic information pool of the second reality can be expressed in picture drawing form.
I have also been part of a long-distance experiment (1500 miles) in which the task was to tell, at a prearranged time, what kind of music would be playing in a building I had never visited. Would the music be hard rock, classical, country, or African drums? I did this six days in a row, and successfully identified all six rhythms.
But what I did in each of these six experiments was to take a pen and paper and draw out the beats or tempos I felt coming in through my ESP core. Each of the four types of music is distinct from the other through their tempos and beats. The picture drawing told me which type of music was being played. If I had allowed only my conscious thought processes to analyze the incoming information, I would not have done so well—because my conscious mind was busy “hearing” all four types at once.
Further Adventures
After you become familiar enough with the picture drawing process, you can try more complicated adventures, such as prophecy. Choose a date and time in the future, and picture-draw the place you will be then. Naturally, this wall have to be a place you have no plans to visit. Each of us probably doesn’t know exactly where we will be on Saturday at four o’clock in the afternoon. Carry your picture drawing with you, and on that day at four o’clock take it out and compare it to where you happen to find yourself. Be honest. Do not “plan” your Saturday to coincide with your drawing.
You can also picture-draw the faces of people you don’t know. Ask a friend to give you the name of a person, and then let your ESP core produce a picture drawing. Show it to your friend and ask him to point out the resemblances.
The sex of an unborn child can frequently be determined through picture drawings. Lost items can be found as a result of a picture drawing. Use the lost item as the “target” and let the ESP core produce its picture drawing. Usually there will be enough information in the picture drawing to locate the item.
But all this is advanced work. When you begin, keep it simple. Work with table-top targets until you can cope with all the intricacies of the picture drawing processes.
Resist the Overtraining Urge
There is another important phenomenon that I think should be brought out as you get ready to do your own experiments. One of the mysteries (among so many) that parapsychologists have never been able to resolve, but have frequently observed, is the sudden cessation of ESP in an individual who had a recent string of hits. After a certain success rate has been reached, suddenly the whole ESP system seems to collapse, and the person goes through a period in which he cannot call the target at all, as if something in the ESP system were avoiding it altogether.
In parapsychology this is called “psi-missing” and it has dragged many elegantly designed experiments into oblivion. I’ve experienced this myself. It is associated with a certain inner fatigue and collapse of the psychic pathway, analogous to computer overload.
In parapsychology, experiments are often run in a very long series, giving the subject no resting time. When the subject is doing well, the researcher is likely to say “Boy, are you hot. Do a few more.” And in doing those few more trials, the bottom drops out, sometimes forever. The same thing happens in gambling. An individual scores a few big ones and thinks, “Wow, I’m on a roll. …” And shortly, all the gains are gone.
In 1975, I turned my attention to this problem. It’s like telling a long-distance runner that he has just run one hundred miles very well so why not try for another hundred. No one in his right mind would do that. The system expended energy successfully, but it needs to reload. Even cars need to stop for gas. Yet this is done all the time in parapsychology, under the ill-advised assumption that if ESP is working, that is just the time to drive it a little further.
I found the answer, or at least part of it, in a very unlikely place—muscle building. For a long time, muscle builders thought they needed to train considerably longer and harder to force muscles to develop. To some degree this is true, but the latest thinking on the problem is that you can overtrain the muscles. In fact, the overtraining principle is now being very closely adhered to in many different sports.
Muscle writer Joe Meeko, in an article entitled “Overrule the Overtraining Urge” in Muscular Development, October 1985, pins this down when he asks if you have ever wanted a body part to grow bigger and more defined so desperately that you constantly trained it to the limit … only to find it getting smaller and less impressive? This constitutes overtraining, and the rule now is that when a muscle seemingly goes “flat” and no longer feels pumped, you should stop there. Doing more is overtraining the muscle.
I’ve applied this principle to ESP, and to very good advantage. It seems we should not treat the development of our mental talents much differently than we are now learning to treat our physical talents. Have you ever burned the midnight oil, trying to make up for lost time in study, only to find that you can’t remember anything the next day? Much the same thing appears to be true for ESP.
Our emerging ESP is a very fragile thing. Its early testing might be spontaneously successful. I call this the first-time effect. It needs to be tutored and paced, like any other talent.
The time to stop trying is when you feel your ESP is no longer pumped up, but seems to have gone flat. Let your ESP system consolidate its gains and recover its energies. For nearly nine years, I’ve made it a principle to stop ESP experiments or drills or work just past that moment when I was doing excellently, and not even wait for the flat feeling to come in. The psi-missing syndrome can be avoided this way. If I keep driving myself past this point, soon the system collapses.
You should watch this carefully in your own experiments. If you succeed, stop there, rest for a while (a whole day is advisable), and proceed the next day. You will find your accuracy and endurance increases a little each time. Let your internal intuition set the pace for you, not your conscious excitement that says “Do more, more now, you are hot.”