The Reality Behind Picture Drawings
Psychic picture drawing began in 1882, and has resurfaced every now and then during the intervening hundred years. Taken all together, they give substance to the existence of extrasensory perception better and more completely than any other kind of evidence parapsychology has to offer.
In bringing this book to a conclusion, I’d like to point the reader’s attention to what picture drawings represent in themselves, outside of being mere replicas of some given target, and the central processing difficulties individuals might experience in perceiving it.
Picture drawings have been produced by people of all different ages and from different walks and stations of life. Children and youths with no psychic experience at all can produce them as well as a mature, developed psychic.
Picture drawings you produce yourself are of a convincing nature, insofar as we can be convinced of anything. Rene Warcollier, in his 1945 book Mind to Mind, made the most explicit statement about them when he noted that he had no doubt at all that the drawing technique as a whole, using any statistically valid method of assessment, is truly repeatable, in the sense that any who care to try will obtain substantially the same results as have others. He went on to say that he believed that those who try such experiments themselves will be convinced.
But convinced of what? Warcollier was working within the telepathy concept, using senders and receivers from Paris to New York, or wherever. So it appeared to them that “telepathy” was the active force that lay behind the picture drawings themselves. But since his time, picture drawings also have been produced outside the telepathy concept; from inanimate nondescript objects, from objects hidden in cans or located halfway around the world, and from experiments designed to see if a psychic could perceive a future situation that no one had yet decided upon.
To some degree, picture drawings might reinforce our current concepts of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition (and postcognition), but if you look at them as a whole and not as a product of one of these labels; they hint at a larger, more general reality.
In this book, I’ve shown how picture drawings undercut the problems of verbalizing and wording. Wording is culturally acquired, and divides people into language groups. But we can see that picture drawing processes commonly used words to describe an element that is not easily reducible to a picture in the first place—a feeling, an emotion, or some other delicate nuance.
I’ve also pointed out one particular characteristic of all the picture drawings, the fact that they are so generally alike that if one did not know they had been produced by several different people over a century, we might think they were all done by the same person. I believe a huge mistake has been made in not realizing that picture drawings are more than just sketches. They have been thought of, rather automatically, as an individual’s artistic representation of his or her impressions, using art rather than words to record the psychic impressions. This is not the case at all.
I am an artist, as is Hella Hammid, and a few other picture drawers have been artists also. But I can assure you that I can draw much better than what occurs in picture drawings. In fact, the larger majority of picture drawers have not been artists. Many picture drawers have introduced themselves as people who can’t draw; and indeed have no previous art background.
The relative ease by which picture drawings can be produced by nonartists, together with the striking similarity of all picture drawings, suggests that the drawings are not the product of an individual’s artistic processes, but are a kind of basic psychic language in themselves. A language that has gone totally unnoticed by all parapsychologists.
This psychic pictolanguage has one element in common among all picture drawers. It translates the incoming psychic information into basic forms and shapes which are then recognized by the individual’s psychic system and consciousness. The picture drawing mechanism seldom goes beyond this specific task, and it is unusual to find picture drawings fleshed out into highly artistic renderings. When the drawing is fleshed out, we are most likely to discover that it has been done so by consciousness trying to fill in the holes and that what has been filled in is erroneous.
Pristine examples of picture drawing are all a kind of psychic imaging shorthand, truncated, brief, and to the point. With experience, picture drawings do become more precise as to details and relationships, but the shorthand quality remains the same. It is this basic shape-form characteristic that causes all picture drawings to resemble each other. It is the commonality that tells us that we are dealing with a psychic language of some kind and not an individual’s artistic bent.
Shape-form recognition is basic to any form of perception, as all physiologists and psychologists have known for some time. It is the primal function around which all additional perceptual systems of the organic entity are organized. Shape-form recognition normally takes place automatically, that is to say, in those parts of us that are below consciousness. If consciousness had to deliberately analyze anew every shape and form it encountered, life would be a grueling task indeed. Shape-form recognition has become automatic and spontaneous.
It is at this same nonconscious automatic and spontaneous level that psychic picture drawings are encountered. We can put together the following scenario: The deeper self is connected into the vast reaches of the second reality, where space and time are irrelevant. In the psychic mode, the psychic nucleus selects information from that reality, and the ESP core begins to process it, and give it immediate shape and form. This immediate shape-form pops out in a pictolanguage that is universal in all its characteristics. It is only at a second stage of interpretation that language components are introduced, and then in the language of an individual.
It is important to note that psychic picture drawings are unique only in their psychic aspect. Otherwise, they have close relatives in the drawings of children, in doodles, and in the structural sketches of artists, architects, and inventors.
In 1973, when I was trying to figure out just what picture drawings were, I began a search in literature outside the parapsychological framework. Rudolf Arnheim’s well-known book Art and Visual Perception was particularly significant, especially Chapter IV, entitled “Growth.” Among other things, this chapter deals with “Why Do Children Draw That Way?” and it contains many examples of children’s drawings that are identical to the shape-form characteristics found in psychic picture drawings. Amheim makes the revealing statement:
From the outset I have insisted that we cannot hope to understand the nature of visual representation if we try to derive it directly from optical projections of the physical objects that constitute our world. [Artistic] pictures and sculptures of any style possess properties that cannot be explained as mere modifications of the perceptual raw material received through the senses.… If we assumed that the point of departure for visual experience was the optical projections supplied by the lenses of the eyes, we would expect that the earliest attempts at imagery would cleave most closely to those projections…. Any deviation from that model, we would expect, would be a later development, reserved for the freedom of mature sophistication. But instead, the opposite is true. The early drawings of children show neither the predicted conformity to realistic appearance nor the expected spatial projections.* [*Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, A Psychology of the Creative Eye, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955 and 1974, p. 163.]
In fact, children draw via what Arnheim calls “representational concepts,” which is exactly what psychic picture drawings are when we look at them closely. Representational concepts furnish the equivalent of the visual concepts we would otherwise wish to express. But the representational concepts are being manufactured somewhere within the topography of our deeper selves, and always bear preconscious processing attributes, whether in children or mature adults.
Arnheim’s chapter also discusses the value of the curved, vertical, or horizontal line, and the differentiation and fusion of the parts: that is, several of the phenomena you will run into in your own psychic picture drawings. If you are going to undertake your experiments seriously, I recommend you study Arnheim’s book.
While I was working on the manuscript for this book, the ideas presented in it received some unexpected analogous support from a new book that has just come into print. It reveals the importance of drawings and the unconscious phenomena that characterize the picture drawing processes.
Drawing on the Artist Within by Betty Edwards (author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) examines in penetrating detail the basic emotional and intuitive aspect of drawings and the commonality the drawings share. Her book is filled with examples of drawings that bear close similarities to psychic picture drawings as well as the representational-concept drawings of children. She dubs these drawings “analog drawings,” and the patterns produced by them suggest the universality of certain “sentic forms” observed by neurophysiologist-musician Manfred Clynes.
But whether called analog drawings, representational concepts, or psychic picture drawings, Edwards enunciates a crowning concept:
Complexity aside, I am going to forge ahead and assume that a nonverbal, visual language of drawing exists as a possible parallel to verbal language, even though I cannot at this point spell it out.… A language of drawing, of course, is not the only possible parallel language. There exist, obviously, many nonverbal languages: the language of sound (music), the language of movement (dance or sports), of abstract symbolic thought (mathematics and science), of color (painting), of film (as Orwell suggested), and the language of Nature itself—the genetic code, for example. Each of these could perhaps serve equally well … for making thought visible. * [*Betty Edwards, Drawing on the Artist Within, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 53.]
Later in her book, Edwards introduces the concept “It thinks.” She is referring to that interior something, beneath or beyond our consciousness, that itself is busy constructing concepts that are later pushed up into our consciousness in a relatively completed form. But we can now comprehend that this phenomenon is clearly akin to the function provided by the psychic picture drawing. The psychic picture drawing (like representational concepts or analog drawings) is a form of language the unconscious psychic “It thinks” is using to push up into consciousness its psychic nucleus perceptions of things in the universe that are invisible to our physical senses. Edwards’s book is a must. Not only will it help liberate your spontaneous drawing capabilities, but it will give you an excellent grounding in the scope of this pictolanguage.
All these phenomena are, without doubt, very important in coming to grips with the essentials of the extrasensory experience. But I think there is an importance that goes far beyond that. Since the ESP core seems to be universally shared, it is much closer to universal psychic communion than are the elements of our consciousness or frontal consciousness. The modern focus on increasing individuality has done nothing at all to ameliorate the ills of the world or to resolve the dangers which seem to increase all the time.
The trend of the new age is toward self-enlightenment and a deeper communion with the energies and forces that underlie the individual, who, often operating out of attunement with the whole, is only bringing added disaster upon all.
The present trend, which began some two hundred years ago, is all toward speed and intensified individualism. As the controversial art critic Suzi Gablik has noted:
Modernism discouraged the individual from finding any good outside himself. Today, there is still a pervasive sense that only by divorcing themselves from any social role can artists establish their own individual identity. Freedom and social obligation are experienced in our world as polar opposites which run at cross purposes to each other. In the life of a professional, the world does not impose any mission beyond the realization of one’s professional aims. … It strikes me more and more that as the dangers of planetary survival escalate, the practical consequences of such an attitude are becoming increasingly apparent. Our modernist notions of freedom and autonomy … begin to seem a touch ingenuous.* [*Suzi Gablik, “Changing Paradigms,” New Art Examiner, June 1985, p. 20.]
Gablik was, of course, speaking of modern artists. But her critique can be projected into the world at large and into ESP.
In parapsychology, ESP has been viewed as an individual talent, some special individual mental-body-mind mechanism that the professional aim of parapsychology was to discover. But what if it is not this at all? What if extrasensory perception is but a vast, not particularly individual, gigantic plane that interconnects all humanity with itself and with all existence, and that developed psychics are special only in that they are better integrated into this plane, whereas all others have individuated from it for one reason or another?
This concept reverses the standard concept in parapsychology about what ESP and related psychic talents are all about. But if this concept is adopted, many apparent enigmas immediately become resolvable. For example, it explains why disbelief affects ESP. It individuates the person from the ESP plane to such a degree that he becomes disconnected from it. It explains the source of ESP information, especially as regards people. At a basic level, we are all interconnected.
The implications of this are enormous; but these implications are in keeping with advanced thinking in physics, in which this interconnectedness is frequently referred to as “field theory” or “field concept.” In her incisive book The Cosmic Web, N. Katherine Hayles has identified the concept so clearly that I can’t resist quoting it.
Perhaps most essential to the field concept is the notion that things are interconnected. The most rigorous formulations of this idea are found in modern physics. In marked contrast to the atomistic Newtonism idea of reality, in which physical objects are discrete and events are capable of occurring independently of one another and the observer, a field view of reality pictures objects, events, and observer as belonging inextricably to the same field; the disposition of each, in this view, is influenced—sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly, but in every instance—by the disposition of the others.* [*N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1984, pp. 9-10.]
There are many concrete examples of this interconnectedness. Scientists now know that flocking birds in flight do not simply follow a leader as was once thought. When the flock turns, it turns as a flock, as if the flock itself is an interconnected organism. Carroll Nash, a biologist and parapsychologist, and his colleagues at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, have demonstrated that the growth rate of bacteria can be affected by the mental intention of a group of people concentrating on them. Many earlier experiments testing the “efficacy of prayer” showed positive results. It has also been shown that plants generally grow better in musical environments that are harmonious—rock music causes many plants to wilt or die.
But all examples like these have one thing in common—the fact that the whole experiment is an information exchange environment at levels beneath our conscious awareness and the fact that consciously held mental attitudes can feed back into the information exchange system and influence it in turn.
This is exactly analogous to ESP. In environments that have a positive outlook about ESP, it tends to emerge more spontaneously. When a strong psychic emerges, ESP tends to emerge in others in his environment. The reverse is also true. I’ve been in at least three parapsychology laboratories where the leading figure of the lab has stated he has never seen any ESP in his presence. Reports of their work reveal no ESP or very little of it as a result of their experiments.
What is different between the two orientations is that the underlying interconnecting levels have been cut off in the negative instances, and reinforced in the positive ones. The psychic pathways in individuals reorient themselves in the pro environment, and soon ESP is being experienced by the majority.
All this suggests that real communion between people takes place at the extrasensory level. Mere intellectual communication does not bring people together, but sets up individuality differences which shortly can expand into conflicts.
If this is so, then the closer one is connected to one’s own ESP core and psychic nucleus, the more interconnected that person is going to be with the greater realities that lie beneath conscious individuation.
If, like the hundredth monkey, there emerged one hundred people who could contact their psychic nucleus and know it to be real through self-experimentation and self-enlightenment and illumination, then we could expect to see some major shifts, not only in the incidence of real ESP, but in the basic communal layer that interconnects all humanity. If this were increased a hundredfold by people disposed toward world peace and the resolution of the plagues of the ecosphere and biosphere, a new age might truly have dawned.
This would amount to a gigantic reintegration of the objective world with the vital elements of the second reality.
Picture drawings, on the surface so humble, serve to help you know what a hidden object might be. But in another, more important, way, they help resurrect the psychic communion factor so obviously missing in the world at large. Thus, in my opinion, confirmation of one’s own ESP through the relatively simple device of picture drawing experiments is destined to play a very important role in the new age ahead. Picture drawings, as so many have discovered, are but the first step to entering the greater psychic realities; but a very important first step they are.
So find your coworker, form your experimental groups, and get on with it. I, for one, would like to hear how you fare.
INGO SWANN
c/o Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc.
5858 Wilshire Blvd., 200
Los Angeles, CA 90036