The archetype when manifesting in a synchronistic phenomenon, is truly awesome if not outright miraculous—an uncanny dweller on the threshold. At once psychical and physical, it might be likened to the two-faced god Janus. The two faces of the archetype are joined in the common head of meaning.
—Stephan A. Holler, The Gnostic Jung
Of all the experiences in the transpersonal realm, those of a psychoid nature represent the greatest challenge to our everyday perception of reality. The term psychoid was first used by C. G. Jung in relation to archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung found that archetypes were shared by most or all of humanity, and in this sense they were transindividual, that is, not created by any one individual’s history or experience. However, he originally believed that they were inborn psychological predispositions, similar to instincts, and thus had their representations in our brains.
In his original formulation, Jung also described the archetypes as operating within the psyche but not possessing consciousnesses independent of us. Later, Jung revised his position. He came to believe that archetypes had consciousnesses quite separate from our own, and were able to think and act on their own. So they were not, in this view, like fictional characters created and controlled by their authors. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung himself described them as: “higher things than the ego’s will.” He believed it was important to see them as beings that “I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.” He revised his earlier view of archetypes because it did not explain some of the important characteristics of archetypes, particularly as they related to the phenomenon Jung called synchronicity. He observed that there were many instances when archetypes interacted with events in the external world in ways that were meaningful and coherent, suggesting relationships between inner and outer realities that we cannot explain in terms of causality, which is one of the keys of traditional Western science.
It was Jung’s recognition of phenomena that exist outside cause and effect that led him to define synchronicity as an “acausal connecting principle.” Meaningful coincidences between the inner world—the world of visions and dreams—and the outer world of “objective reality” suggested to Jung that the two worlds were not as clearly separated as we might think. He began referring to archetypes as having a “psychoid” nature, that is they belonged neither to the realm of the psyche nor to the realm of material reality. Instead they existed within a strange twilight zone between consciousness and matter.1
The blurring of boundaries between consciousness and matter challenges everything we are taught in traditional Western thinking. From a very early age we are urged by our parents, teachers, and religious leaders to draw clear lines between the “subjective” and the “objective,” the “real” and the “unreal,” the existent and the non-existent, or the tangible and the intangible. However, a reality that is very similar to Jung’s acausal universe is becoming recognized in modern science, notably in quantum-relativistic physics. For this reason, the study of psychoid phenomena lies at the frontiers of human knowledge. Unfortunately, a serious scientific approach to this area is exceptionally difficult.
Not only does this category of experiences represent the most radical challenge to the traditional scientific worldview, but by nature it is strangely elusive and can have a capricious, almost trickster-like quality. This is further confounded by the fact that many experiences that belong to this category have been widely popularized in movies and novels. We have grown accustomed to assigning the existence of ghosts, poltergeists, UFOs, and psychokinesis to the imaginary world of horror movies and fictional stories. This popularization, while encouraging us to think about such matters, at least in an entertaining way, also has a tendency to trivialize, to condition us to thinking of them as “only make-believe.”
Since Jung’s death, modern consciousness research and the study of non-ordinary states have brought considerable support for his ideas concerning psychoid phenomena. At this point there can be no doubt that this is an area that deserves much more attention than it has received in the past. In this chapter we explore several types of transpersonal experiences that have psychoid characteristics. Their common denominator is that they are more than products of fantasy and imagination, yet they may be missing certain characteristics that would allow them to be defined as unequivocally “real” in the everyday sense of the word. In the following discussion, I apply the term psychoid in a way that extends beyond Jung’s use of this word, which he originally reserved for archetypes.
As I will be using the term here, psychoid experiences can be divided into three basic categories. The first category contains the most common psychoid phenomena—synchronicities, in the Jungian sense. It is here that we would place inner experiences that are synchronistic with events in the material world. Neither the inner experiences nor the external events are necessarily unusual in themselves; rather, it is the acausal link between them that is striking. The existence of synchronicities of this kind suggests that psyche and matter are not independent of one another but that they can enter into playful interactions where boundaries between them fade or dissolve altogether.
A second category represents an important step beyond the first. Here we would place events in the external world that are associated with inner experiences and that traditional science would deem impossible. Typical examples of events that belong to this category include manifestations witnessed by participants in spiritistic seances and the so-called Poltergeist phenomena occurring around certain individuals. These two types of experiences have been thoroughly researched by many outstanding parapsychologists. Similarly, spiritual literature describes “supernatural luminosity” around the bodies of certain saints, while modern athletes occasionally report events that fall into the realm of the physically impossible. Another phenomenon that belongs here is the twilight zone of UFO encounters, which also has distinct psychoid features.
A third category is reserved for the forms of psychoid experiences where mental activity is used to deliberately manipulate consensus reality. This includes psychokinesis, ceremonial magic, healing and hexing by aboriginal people, and supernatural feats of the yogis (called siddhis).
Synchronicity: Worlds Beyond Cause
Newtonian-Cartesian science describes the universe as an infinitely complex system of mechanical events that are strictly deterministic, governed by the principle of cause and effect. Every process in the world has its specific causes and, in turn, causes other things to happen. In spite of the uncomfortable paradox that it entails—the problem of defining the original cause of all causes—this understanding of reality continues to be the basic credo of traditional scientists. Thinking in causal terms has been so successful in Western science that it has been hard to even imagine processes that would not be subjected to the dictate of cause and effect—except, of course the beginning of the universe itself.
Because of this deeply ingrained belief in causality as a central law of nature, Jung hesitated for many years to publish his observations of events that refused to fit into this mold. He postponed publication of his work on this subject until he and others had collected literally hundreds of convincing examples of synchronicity, making him absolutely sure that he had something valid to report. In his famous work, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung expressed his view that rather than being an absolute law of nature, causality is a statistical phenomenon. Furthermore, he made the point that there are many instances where this “law” does not apply.
Most of us have encountered strange coincidences that defy ordinary explanation. The Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, one of the first to be interested in the scientific implications of this phenomenon, reported a situation where his tram ticket bore the same number as the theater ticket that he bought immediately afterward; later that evening the same sequence of digits was given to him as a telephone number.2 The astronomer Flammarion cited an amusing story of a triple coincidence involving a certain Mr. Deschamps and a special kind of plum pudding. As a boy, Deschamps was given a piece of this pudding by a Mr. de Fortgibu. Ten years later, he saw the same pudding on the menu of a Paris restaurant and asked the waiter for a serving. However, it turned out that the last piece of the pudding was already ordered—by Mr. de Fortgibu, who just happened to be in the restaurant at that moment. Many years later, Mr. Deschamps was invited to a party where this pudding was to be served as a special rarity. While he was eating it, he remarked that the only thing lacking was Mr. de Fortgibu. At that moment the door opened and an old man walked in. It was Mr. de Fortgibu who burst in on the party by mistake because he had been given a wrong address for the place he was supposed to go.3
As interesting as the collections of similar events might have been, Jung was primarily interested in those coincidences where various external events were meaningfully connected with inner experiences. This was the variety of apparent coincidences that he referred to as synchronicities; these involve a “simultaneous occurrence of a psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” Among the many instances of synchronicity in Jung’s own life, one is particularly famous; it occurred during a therapy session with one of his patients. This patient was very resistant to treatment and up to the time of this particular event little or no progress had been made. She had a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. During the analysis of this dream Jung heard a sound at the window. Upon opening it he found a scarab-like rose-chafer beetle on the windowsill trying to get inside. It was a very rare specimen, the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that can be found in that latitude. Nothing like that had ever happened to Jung before. He opened the window, brought the beetle inside, and showed it to the client. This amazing synchronicity had a profound impact on her process and marked the beginning of a psychological renewal.4
My wife and I have both observed many extraordinary synchronicities in our work and have experienced them repeatedly in our own lives outside our work. One in particular is still vivid in my memory. As I have mentioned elsewhere, my wife, Christina, went through a psychospiritual crisis that lasted twelve years and involved spontaneously occurring episodes of non-ordinary states of consciousness. At a certain period, one particular symbol appeared repeatedly in her visions: a white swan. In the evening after a day when she had a particularly significant experience involving the vision of the swan, we both participated in a shamanic session with anthropologist-shaman Michael Harner, whom we were hosting at our month-long seminar at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Michael was staging a healing ceremony of the Salish Indians involving a “spirit canoe.” In this ceremony the shaman goes on a visionary trip to the underworld to retrieve the soul of a client who has come to him for help. During this inner journey the shaman has three encounters with an animal, which is thereafter identified as the client’s guardian spirit or power animal. In this particular session, Christina volunteered to be the client. Michael went on his visionary journey to the underworld, and when he returned he whispered into Christina’s ear: “Your spirit animal is a white swan.” After this she danced the swan dance in front of the group.
It is important to note here that Michael Harner had no prior knowledge of Christina’s inner processes nor did he know of her previous visions of the swan. The next day, Christina received a letter from a person who had attended a workshop we had given several months before. She opened it and found a photograph of her spiritual teacher Swami Muktananda. In the photo he was sitting in a garden near a large flower pot shaped like a white swan; he had a mischievous expression on his face and his right thumb and index finger were held together forming the universal “okay” sign, indicating approval. Although there were no causal connections between any of these events, they clearly formed a meaningful psychological pattern.
Synchronistic events such as these can be linked with many other forms of transpersonal experiences and occasionally also with perinatal sequences. Time and time again I have seen highly improbable accumulations of mishaps and accidents in the lives of people who in their inner processes were approaching the experience of ego death. As they completed this process and experienced spiritual rebirth, these threats ceased, almost as if by magic. As Christina’s experience illustrates, when a person connects with an animal spirit guide through shamanic or other inner work, this animal tends to appear again and again in that person’s life. Similarly, at the time of inner confrontation with archetypal images such as the Animus, the Anima, the Great Mother Goddess, the Goddess of Love, and others, we frequently find ourselves coming into contact with people in our everyday lives who ideally represent these archetypes. When this occurs, the only cause we can find for these synchronicities is the capricious interplay between our inner worlds and the physical world outside us.
The concept of synchronicity has important implications for the practice of psychotherapy. In a mechanical universe where everything is linked by cause and effect, there is no place for “meaningful coincidences” in the Jungian sense. In the practice of traditional psychiatry, when a person perceives meaningful coincidences, he or she is, at best, diagnosed as projecting special meaning into purely accidental events; at worst he or she is diagnosed as suffering from hallucinations or delusions. Traditional psychiatrists either do not know about the existence of true synchronicities or they prefer to ignore the concept. As a result they may wrongly diagnose “meaningful coincidences” as the result of serious pathology (delusions of reference). In many cases of spiritual emergencies, where valid synchronicities were reported, people have all too often been hospitalized unnecessarily. Had those experiences been correctly understood and treated as manifestations of psycho-spiritual crisis those same people might have been quickly helped through approaches supporting spiritual emergence, rather than undergoing all the problems that unnecessary hospitalization entails.
Jung himself was fully aware of the fact that the concept of synchronicity was incompatible with traditional science and he followed with great interest the revolutionary new worldview that was emerging from developments in modern physics. He maintained a friendship with Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, and the two of them had a very fruitful exchange of ideas. Similarly, in personal communications between Jung and Albert Einstein, the latter explicitly encouraged him to pursue the concept of synchronicity because it was fully compatible with the new thinking in physics.5 Sadly, however, mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists have still not caught up with the revolutionary developments in modern physics and Jungian psychology.
Pushing Past the Boundaries of Material Reality
Many experiences in the psychoid realm involve physical events in the external world that seem to violate what we believe to be the laws of nature. These events can be limited to the perception of one person or observed by many, and thus they have the usual characteristics of consensus reality. Traditional psychiatry has been aware of the existence of such situations but it unfortunately relegates them to the realm of pathology.
In psychiatry, a reality that does not conform to the Newtonian-Cartesian worldview but that is nevertheless shared by two people, is labeled a folie a deux—meaning, in effect, a craziness shared by two people. When an entire family shares a reality that seems to violate the beliefs of Newtonian-Cartesian science, as was the case with C. G. Jung’s experiences that led to his Seven Sermons for the Dead, the corresponding traditional term is folie a famille. When large numbers of people are similarly involved, their collective experience is called “mass hallucination.” However, closer examination shows that the phenomena so labeled may deserve serious attention and should not be discarded quite so easily. They have been observed and recorded throughout the ages in many different parts of the world. Deeper understanding of the mechanisms involved could radically change our view of reality.
Some psychoid phenomena involve dramatic changes of the human body and its functions. Religious and mystical literature abounds with descriptions of spectacular physiological changes in people as they experienced transpersonal states of consciousness. For example, people in the presence of saints and spiritual teachers such as St. Ignatius of Loyola or Sri Ramana Maharishi, frequently described how their physical bodies took on an extraordinary luminosity. Similarly, it has been documented many times over that certain Christian mystics and contemplatives while in ecstatic raptures wherein they transpersonally identified with Jesus Christ, have manifest bleeding wounds (stigmata) on their hands and feet, apparent lance wounds in their abdomens, or puncture marks around the crowns of their heads, where Christ wore his crown of thorns. It is generally thought that St. Francis of Assisi was the first to exhibit these changes; since his time, over 300 stigmatics are known to have borne these marks of crucifixion. Related to stigmata is the “token of espousal,” a ring-shaped ridge of flesh that forms around the finger of certain nuns as a symbol of betrothal to Christ.
Another physical manifestation that can accompany transpersonal states of consciousness is extreme body heat. In the Christian literature, this is called the Fire of Love (incendium amoris); the most famous modern case is that of Padre Pio of Foggia, Italy, whose doctors occasionally found his temperature to be 112 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Sufi tradition, this same phenomenon is known as the “Fire of Separation”; in Tibetan Buddhism as Tum-mo, the “Inner Fire.” There are documented cases involving extreme forms of this phenomenon, in which the person explodes or bursts into flames, apparently through some form of spontaneous combustion. Equally incredible are reports involving the capacity of certain re-nunciates to live without food. A close friend of ours, the late Tantric scholar Ajit Mookerjee, told us that he was personally acquainted with Himalayan hermits who did not need any food whatsoever, who lived on—of all things!—a few drops of mercury each year.
According to the Tibetan literature, backed up by reports of Tibetan teachers with whom we have had extensive personal contact, the bodies of masters involved in certain secret practices actually dematerialize following their physical deaths. This contrasts with reports about the apparent incorruptibility of the bodies of other saints, such as St. Bernadette of Lourdes and Paramahansa Yogananda, that allegedly did not decompose. Another phenomenon that stretches the credulity of educated Westerners, but which has been repeatedly mentioned in spiritual literature, is the act of levitation. It has been described by personal witnesses who observed certain Christian saints, including St. Teresa of Avila, various Indian yogis, and Tibetan lamas, as well as mediums such as Daniel Douglas Home and Eusapia Palladino. Although I have not personally witnessed any of the extreme phenomena described here, I keep an open mind because these events have been reported repeatedly by credible witnesses and they are closely related to occurrences that I have observed first hand in my work. Michael Murphy’s book The Future of the Body offers an amazing review of meticulously documented supernormal occurrences throughout the ages.
The Psychic Side of Sports
In modern life, extraordinary events of the kind described above occur most often where one might least expect them—in sports. We tend to attribute stellar performances in various athletic activities to a combination of inborn disposition, psychological perseverance, and down-to-earth physical training. However, the inside story, from some of the world’s greatest athletes, reveals that the players themselves often see it quite differently. Many report that at the time of their peak performances they were in states that resembled mystical rapture. Their experience in the psychoid realm, such as the radical alteration of time and space, to them bordered on the miraculous. The book The Psychic Side of Sports, by Michael Murphy and Rhea White, is a gold mine of just such examples, reported by athletes in virtually every sport. Moreover, Murphy and White’s research uncovered many instances in which the extraordinary inner experiences of the athletes were matched by corresponding perceptions of the onlookers.
Football players, race car drivers, Olympic divers, and others have described an extreme slowing of subjective time, so that they felt they had all the time in the world to perform what they had to do. Golfers, football players, ocean divers, sky divers, and mountain climbers reported drastic changes in body image; sometimes these changes were perceived by onlookers as actual changes in body shape and size. Football players have described how they seemed to have penetrated the solid wall of a defensive line by dematerializing and rematerializing on the other side. Runners felt inexhaustible sources of energy and had a sense of moving without real effort and without actually touching the ground. The great soccer player Pele confided that on a day when everything was going right, he felt a strange calmness, euphoria, and endless energy. He was absolutely confident that he could dribble through the opponent’s defense and pass through them physically. Scores of reliable witnesses have testified that Morehei Uyeshiba, the inventor of aikido, appeared to transcend physical laws when he demonstrated his abilities. Facing as many as six attackers with knives, who were well-trained in martial arts, he appeared to change his shape and size and was able to disappear for instants, then reappear in other places. Some of these feats are evident in a documentary movie showing his artistry; his followers swear the film was never edited or in any way tampered with, though the master at times seems to disappear before our eyes as if photographic tricks are involved. Witnesses to the actual filming reported experiencing the same miraculous events that the film recorded.
The World of Parapsychology: Science, Fraud, and Fiction
Another large category of psychoid experiences, traditionally studied by parapsychologists, is that of spiritistic manifestations and Poltergeist phenomena. We have already explored transpersonal experiences that involve discarnate entities and spirits. These are often associated with various physical events that are synchronistic with inner events, or that can be observed and confirmed by numbers of people. Thus, for example, certain places in the world are considered “haunted” because many visitors to that place independently experience the same kinds of unusual events.
In various spiritistic seances participants often shared certain strange experiences, such as raps and bangs on walls and floors, touches from invisible hands, voices speaking from nowhere, the playing of musical instruments, and gusts of cold air. In some cases, this also involved apparitions of deceased persons or voices of such persons coming through the medium. In certain cases, participants were able to witness telekinesis and materializations, levitation of objects and people, movement of objects through the air, manifestation of ectoplasmic formations, and the appearance of writings or small objects without explanation (so-called apports). The famous American parapsychologist R. B. Rhine called this “physical mediumship.” Such events were particularly frequent in the seances with certain mediums, such as Eusapia Palladino and Daniel Douglas Home. These sessions were repeatedly studied by teams of experienced researchers.
There is no question that at the time when spiritism enjoyed its greatest popularity, around the turn of the century, many participants were victims of cunning swindlers. Even famous mediums, including Eusapia Palladino, were occasionally caught cheating. However, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and conclude that this entire area is nothing but fraud. It is difficult to imagine that so many outstanding researchers would have invested so much time and energy in a field with no real phenomena to observe. There exists hardly any other realm where the expert testimony of so many witnesses of the highest caliber has been discounted as stupidity and gullibility and thus written off. We have to realize that among serious researchers were many people with outstanding credentials, such as, the famous physicist Sir William Crookes, the Nobel Prize-winning physician and physiologist Charles Richet, and Sir Oliver Lodge, a Fellow of the Royal Society in England.
The Tapping Sprite
Another interesting phenomenon studied by the parapsychologists has been popularized by Hollywood in recent years. It is the phenomenon known by its German name Poltergeist, meaning “the tapping sprite”; the technical term for it is recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK). RSPK refers to a wide range of bizarre events that can start happening spontaneously and for which there is no reasonable explanation. Objects are seen flying through the air, catching on fire, or falling and breaking. Articles are mysteriously teleported in and out of locked rooms and closed drawers or cabinets. An entire room or building can be filled with sounds such as raps, bangs, scratching, whistling, or even human voices. Investigations of Poltergeist cases typically result in the discovery of one person, often an adolescent, who seems to be the source of the unusual events. When a conflict with that person is resolved, or the person is removed from the vicinity, the Poltergeist phenomena tend to cease.
It is interesting to note that patterns of psychoid manifestations seem to be changing with time. While physical mediumship has virtually disappeared in modern times, Poltergeist cases continue to be recorded and studied by highly credible parapsychological researchers of our times. In the past, the person causing Poltergeist phenomena was usually found to be a young woman whose average age was sixteen; present day phenomena of this kind reveals both sexes to be equally implicated, with the average age having risen to twenty.
Aware of the extremely controversial nature of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, the best investigators have subjected their cases to unusually meticulous scrutiny. Probably the most extensive research in this area has been conducted in Germany, at the Institute for the Study of the Frontiers of Psychology and Psychohygiene, under the meticulous direction of Hans Bender.
One of the best documented cases of RSPK is one that was witnessed by over forty people, most of them highly qualified technicians, physicists, and other professionals. The Poltergeist events began in November 1967 at a law office in the Bavarian town of Rosenheim. It started as problems with the lighting fixtures that could not be explained or corrected by trained electricians. There were reports of loud sounds from unknown sources, of copy machine breaking down, and of the entire office phone system malfunctioning. Telephone monitoring devices were registering calls that were never made and the company’s telephone bill skyrocketed. Pictures on the walls moved spontaneously, often a full 360 degrees. Fluorescent tubes fell from ceiling fixtures, endangering employees.
Investigators included highly qualified physicists who were unable to identify the causes of the problems. They concluded, for example, that for the phone calls that had been registered to have been placed without the usual mechanical movements of the phone dials, it would require almost supernatural intelligence and technical knowledge, as well as the ability to judge time intervals in the range of milliseconds. Technicians replaced the fluorescent tubes with incandescent fixtures only to have bulbs explode in the latter. The disturbances became such a serious threat for the staff and clients that the law firm filed a suit with the criminal court against “Unknown Precipitators,” thus protecting themselves from possible suits. Hans Bender was eventually able to trace the disturbances to a nineteen-year-old girl, Annemarie, an employee of the firm who had a strong emotional interest in her boss. When she was transferred to another job, the phenomena immediately ceased.6
The elusive nature of psychoid phenomena and the problems inherent in their study are illustrated in another famous Poltergeist case investigated in 1967 by the American researchers William Roll and Gaither Pratt. This case involved a nineteen-year-old bookkeeper. In connection with his job, this young man had to go regularly to a warehouse. Whenever he went there, objects flew off the shelves, some of them more frequently than others. The researchers were able to arrange experimental situations, wherein they could observe the objects moving. On many occasions, at least one of them had his eyes on the young man when the objects were moving. However, at no time were they able to see the objects at the exact moment they were falling; they fell either immediately before they intended to watch or immediately after they had been doing so. One can speculate from this that the same consciousness source that moved the objects was also aware of the intentions of the observers; anticipating their actions in ways that were quite extraordinary.
Unidentified Flying Objects
Among the most controversial psychoid experiences in modern times we must include UFOs. Since 1947 when they were first reported by civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold near Mount Rainier, countless people have reported seeing UFOs throughout the world. Some reported sighting them in the light of day, while others reported strange lights in the dark of night. Some have claimed to observe the landings of alien spacecrafts. Others have spoken of interacting with aliens or being taken aboard spacecraft where they underwent scientific investigation.
Public interest in UFO reports was sufficient to prompt the U.S. Air Force to undertake extensive studies, headed by a special committee at the University of Columbia. The conclusion of these studies was negative, attributing most UFO reports to people with mental disorders or to “misinterpretations” of easily explained causes, such as weather balloons, meteors, flocks of birds, and unusual light reflections. This research failed to satisfy serious researchers or the public. Government records attest to the fact that the main goal of these studies was to prevent public panic at the possibility of visitation by extraterrestrials. Other material shows that the Air Force has, on occasion, started its own UFO rumors to cover up crashes of top-secret experimental spacecraft of their own.
While many sightings of UFOs have been shown to be hoaxes, misperceptions of more easily explained events, or cover-ups of secret research, there continue to be sightings by people who are reliable witnesses—well educated, highly trained, emotionally stable, intelligent, and articulate. There are enough reports such as these to convince us that the UFO controversy is far from being closed and that it deserves further research.
Discussion in this area is usually limited to the question of whether or not our planet has been visited by actual physical spacecraft from other parts of the universe. However, it seems that the situation is more complicated than that. Many UFO experiences seem to have a psychoid quality, meaning that they are not merely hallucinations, nor are they “real” in the ordinary sense of the word. It is quite possible that they represent strange hybrid phenomena, combining elements of mental life and the physical world. This would, of course, make these experiences extremely difficult to study by traditional scientific methods, which depend on sharp distinctions between real and unreal or material and psychological events. A comprehensive study of these possibilities would have to involve a simultaneous examination of both physical evidence and the psychological perspectives that have emerged from modern consciousness research and the new physics.
As we have previously noted, encounters with alien beings, visions of physical or metaphysical spacecrafts, and extraterrestrial journeying have been reported throughout history. C. G. Jung, who was very interested in UFOs wrote a fascinating book entitled Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. This work was based on careful historical analysis of legends about flying discs and apparitions throughout the ages, many of which caused mass hysteria. He came to the conclusion that the UFO phenomena might be archetypal visions originating in the collective unconscious.
The majority of UFO sightings are associated with visions of lights with supernatural radiance, similar to mystical raptures. The descriptions of the extraterrestrial visitors, alien cities, and spacecrafts certainly have parallels in world mythology and thus could easily be explained as belonging to the collective unconscious. However, that is only one aspect of the story. What interests us in our present context is the fact that in many instances UFOs have left physical evidence behind, thus relegating them to consensus reality. It is this aspect that gives modern UFO phenomena a clear psychoid quality. The nature of the evidence is often ambiguous and is thus left open to a variety of interpretations. However, this capricious, almost trickster-like quality of some UFO sightings seems to be characteristic for psychoid phenomena, rather than being an argument against their existence.
Many readers will remember a report, some years ago, of the UFO sightings by the captain and crew of a Japanese jumbo jet over Alaska. The entire crew saw a spaceship following them. At exactly the same time, a ground-based radar station registered an unidentified object in the location indicated by the crew. Later, when this sensational news made headlines all over the world, the embarrassed radar operator changed his report and announced that closer scrutiny revealed the image of the unidentified flying object to be a technical artifact. This strange error of an expert operator and its uncanny synchronicity with the sighting by a trained crew is characteristic of psychoid events. The confusion surrounding UFOs is also reflected in the approach of the news media, including the Soviet news agency “Tass,” that alternates between reporting sightings and debunking them.
The controversial physical evidence for the existence of UFOs includes impressions in the ground, burnt soil at reported landing sites, materials that cannot be identified by chemical analysis, photographs and amateur movies, stigmata-like marks on the bodies of people who have reportedly been abducted, mysterious cattle mutilations, and others.
In comparing reports from people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs, there has been astonishing agreement in the abductees’ descriptions of the alien life forms and certain symbols encountered during the contacts. Rather remarkable similarities have been discovered, even in abduction reports where the people involved had no knowledge of or interest in UFOs before their abductions. In follow-up research, people who have experienced close encounters have been hypnotized and examined by psychiatrists. The hypnosis has been used to clear the amnesia that many abductees seem to suffer. In many instances, independent reports of several witnesses to the same event fully concurred and were congruent with each other.
One of the best documented cases of this kind is the study of the Andreasson family described in Raymond Fowler’s book The Andreasson Affair. The investigation was conducted at the recommendation of the late UFO expert Dr. Allen Hynek. An investigative team was assembled that included Raymond Fowler, former member of the Security Service of the U.S. Air Force and Dr. Harold Edelstein, director of the New England Institute of Hypnosis. The comprehensive inquiry employed regressive hypnosis, psychiatric examinations, character checks, analysis of weather reports, and electronic stress analysis tests (lie detector tests). The investigators compared independent reports of the principal protagonist, Betty Andreasson, her eldest daughter Becky, and several other family members. The conclusion of the 528-page report that was the result of this investigation was that the witnesses were telling the truth about their experiences.
According to the report, the UFO sighting occurred on a dark January night in 1967. At that time a pulsating light enveloped the backyard of the Andreasson house. Several three-foot tall humanoid creatures with outsized pear-shaped heads, mongoloid features, and large wraparound catlike eyes entered the house. After a brief telepathic exchange, Betty was transported by a suction mechanism to the inside of the spaceship. There she was subjected to a painful examination that included insertion of long silver needles into her nostrils and her peritoneal cavity. Later, she was taken to an alien world with strange architecture and landscape. The culmination of this experience was an encounter with a giant archetypal figure of a bird surrounded by flames, resembling the legendary phoenix. One particularly interesting aspect of the report is that Betty had artistic skills and was able to produce drawings depicting the aliens, the interior of the spaceship, structures in the alien world, and the phoenix that she saw.7
Jacques Vallée, a trained astrophysicist and UFO researcher, has been studying and writing about this subject for nearly two decades. His own opinion about the nature of these phenomena has evolved out of his own first-hand experiences, beginning with a sighting at an observatory in France where he was employed at the time, his examination of photos by others, and his own interviews with people who have reported close encounters. His conclusions support a belief that most UFO sightings conform to what we are here calling psychoid experiences.
Based on many years of intensive research, Vallée has recently concluded that at least some UFOs have a physical reality but these are simultaneously tied in with unusual inner experiences on the part of those who report the sightings. He concludes that the spaceships come from “other dimensions” of space and time that coexist with our own universe and may not be “extraterrestrial” in the usual sense of the word. Vallée speculates that the alien intelligences that produce and control the UFOs might be able to manipulate space and time in ways that are completely beyond our present ability to even imagine. It is possible that the observer’s state of consciousness makes it possible for the UFOs to enter his or her dimension of space and time and become visible. However, the UFOs are not products of the observer’s imagination; like Jung’s spirit guides they exist quite independent of our consciousnesses. In other words, rather than being fabrications of our own imaginations, the “extraterrestrials” are using our consciousnesses as doorways into our everyday level of reality.
In the study of UFO phenomena even the most serious researchers are confronted with investigative problems that perhaps have no solutions in our present state of knowledge. First of all, based on our present knowledge it seems highly unlikely that intelligent life exists on other planets in our solar system; thus, extraterrestrials would have to be coming from distances of many light years away. They would have to be in command of a technology that we can not even imagine. Either their spaceships would have to achieve velocities greater than the speed of light (transluminal travel), or they would have to be able to escape the dimensions of space-time as we know it and travel through hyperspace, or they would have to come from other dimensions of time and space altogether(interdimensional travel). If there exists a civilization out in space that commands such control of the universe, we might also assume that they would have the technology to use both individual and transpersonal consciousnesses in ways completely unknown to us. If all this were true, it is quite possible that their visits to our own dimensions of reality would very likely appear to us as fantasies, archetypal occurrences, or visionary experiences. We could even assume that if they have reason to mask their visitations they have the technology to exploit humans’ deliberate efforts to perpetuate UFO hoaxes to create confusion or disbelief.
All this poses a fascinating problem for us. If UFOs do exist and are the products of the advanced technology we describe here, we are brought face to face with the convergence of two areas that we have always viewed as polar opposites: the rational world of advanced technology and the irrational world of fantasy. From our present vantage point we would no longer be able to distinguish between the two. Interplanetary travel of this scope would indicate the ultimate triumph of rationality and science—an astonishing achievement for any intelligent life form. At the same time, however, we would experience the results of this achievement as phenomena that we usually associate with the world of the magical and mythical—the pre-rational thought processes of primitive cultures, the creative imaginations of artists, and the hallucinations of the insane. It would seem that in these experiences a circle is closing where consciousness, having reached the ultimate frontier of material evolution, is returning to its primal source.
Mind Over Matter: Intentional Psychokinesis
With some psychoid phenomena, changes in consensus reality appear to be the result of the conscious intention of individuals, or groups of individuals, to manipulate events in the physical world. It is important to emphasize that this form of psychoid phenomena called “intentional psychokinesis” operates with no physical intervention; instead, physical changes occur simply by wishing them to happen, or sometimes by performing symbolic or ritualistic acts that have no commonly understood causal relationship with the outcome. Ritual activities aimed at influencing external events have been conducted in pre-industrial cultures for centuries, and descriptions of mind over matter phenomena abound in spiritual and occult literature of all times. However, the potential for human consciousness to directly influence matter has been refuted and systematically debunked by traditional science—in spite of significant supportive evidence from modern parapsychological research and from quantum physics.
Anthropologists and Ceremonial Magic
Anthropologists studying aboriginal cultures have observed and described elaborate ceremonies for bringing rain, ensuring successful hunts or good harvest, and for achieving other practical ends. These anthropologists often expressed puzzlement when they found that these peoples exhibited “double logic”; they showed high intelligence, knowledge, and ingenuity in hunting, fishing, or agriculture, yet they felt the necessity for conducting rituals that seemed to Westerners to be unnecessary, superstitious, and childish. Only those who had sufficient exposure to non-ordinary states of consciousness understand that this “double logic” is related to two different levels of reality: making tools and learning specific skills applies to the material world, while ceremonial life acknowledges and addresses the archetypal dynamics of the transpersonal realm. The nature of these two domains and their mutual interrelationships is far from being clearly understood by modern science, in spite of concerted efforts by both scientists and philosophers. In his book The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas amassed convincing evidence that this problem has been the main focus of European philosophy for the last two and a half thousand years.
The idea of drumming, chanting, and dancing to make rain seems at first glance preposterous to most Westerners. Yet those of us who have actually had first-hand experiences with such rituals have been repeatedly amazed by the results. The late Joseph Campbell, a man of superior intelligence and education, often told a story about his attendance at a Native American rain ceremony in the Southwest United States. When the ceremony began, he felt amused and somewhat cynical, as the sky was clear and blue and there was not a single cloud in sight. To his amazement, during the ceremony heavy clouds covered the entire sky and the day ended with a cloudburst. The Indians did not seem to be at all surprised; because of their past experiences with such rituals, they expected the ceremony to be successful.
During a two-year period of catastrophic drought in California, my wife and I conducted a month long seminar at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. At the request of the group, the centenarian Huichol shaman Don Jose Matsuwa from Mexico, who was among our guest faculty, agreed to conduct a rain ceremony. At the conclusion of the all night ritual it started to drizzle. We were astounded by this unexpected outcome, but Don Jose did not show any signs of surprise. He smiled and said: “It is kupuri (the blessing of the gods); it always happens.” As we walked down to the ocean to do the final offering, the drizzle developed into a heavy downpour that lasted six hours. This does not necessarily mean that Don Jose caused the rain, but similar strange synchronicities must accompany a substantial number of such ceremonies. It is unthinkable that so many cultures would continue conducting rain ceremonies for centuries without some statistically significant success rate. It would also be difficult for a shaman to maintain his or her reputation for a very long time against a series of failures.
The same is true for spiritual healing. Western professionals usually do not take seriously anthropological reports about the therapeutic successes of healing ceremonies and practices conducted in pre-industrial cultures. They attribute alleged improvements to magical thinking, suggestion, and the gullibility of the natives. However, controlled comparative studies of the therapeutic effects of Western medicine and various indigenous healing ceremonies have brought some interesting results. For example, in the southern United States, particularly in Florida, studies of Cuban and other Latin American immigrants have shown that ancient Caribbean healing systems produced, in many cases, better results than Western psychiatry and medicine. In addition, the curanderos (shamanic healers) seemed to know the limits of the indigenous healing procedures and referred clients with certain kinds of problems to American physicians.
Although one might expect successful results only in people with emotional and psychosomatic disorders, some spiritual approaches seem to extend to serious medical problems. I have had close personal contact with researchers who clearly possessed good academic credentials—people like Walter Pahnke, Andrija Puharich, and Stanley Krippner—who studied and recorded on film the work of psychic surgeons in Brazil and the Philippines and were deeply impressed by what they saw. The uneducated Brazilian peasant Arrigo, also called the “surgeon of the rusty knife,” performed hundreds of successful operations daily without disinfection and anesthesia, closing incisions simply by bringing together the edges of the wounds with his fingers. While operating or prescribing medicines, of which he had no intellectual knowledge, he felt guided by the spirit of “Fritz,” a deceased German doctor from Heidelberg.
Tony Agpoa and other psychic surgeons in the Philippines have been known to conduct surgical interventions without instruments of any kind, simply reaching into a person’s body with their hands. These operations have been witnessed by many people at a time and they have been repeatedly filmed. Detailed frame-by-frame studies of the films revealed no sleight of hand or fraud. In some instances, successful results were confirmed by university hospitals, including a case of a tumor of the pituitary gland in a person I know. At the same time, in full accord with the trickster nature of psychoid phenomena, laboratory analysis of tissue samples allegedly removed from people’s bodies during these operations showed them to be from animals. The fact that documented healings have occurred in this field suggest, if nothing else, that there are links between consciousness and the physical world that we have only begun to explore and understand.
On the opposite end of the scale, the negative effects of hexing and “casting spells” have been documented by anthropologists and Western-trained physicians. It is well known among anthropologists, for example, that individuals in native cultures who are hexed by witchdoctors tend to get seriously sick or even die. There have been cases where people hexed in this way died in spite of being removed from their cultural milieu and placed into Western hospitals. Some of these cases have been published in Australia and Africa, where native and Western influences intermingle. One Western researcher, Walter B. Cannon, who has received world-wide attention for his pioneering studies of stress, discussed and accepted as worthy of serious research the fact that serious disease and even death can be produced by hexing or through other purely psychological processes.
Probably the most interesting report involving hexing was published in the Johns Hopkins Medical Journal in the late 1960s. The article described a young woman from Florida who had been hexed at her birth by her midwife. On the day of this woman’s birth the midwife had delivered three girls and predicted they would all die before reaching their nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third birthdays, respectively. When the first young woman actually died in a car accident before reaching her birthday as predicted, the second one spent the day before her twenty-first birthday locked in her home to be absolutely safe. In the evening, reassured that she was safe, she went to a bar to celebrate. She was accidentally killed by a ricocheting bullet. Scared by the uncanny fulfillment of the first two prophecies, the third woman began feeling ill; she was admitted to the Johns Hopkins university hospital. There she died before her twenty-third birthday in spite of all the effort of the staff to save her life; the autopsy failed to show sufficient medical justification for her death.
Another interesting phenomenon documented by anthropologists is the apparent invulnerability of participants in certain kinds of trance states. For example, a movie shot by Elda Hartley in Bali shows ecstatics rolling in piles of broken glass and climbing ladders with sharp swords for rungs without suffering any harm to their bodies.8 I took part in a Brazilian umbanda ceremony in Rio de Janeiro in which participants consumed several quarts of hard liquor (aquavit) while they experienced possession by the deities and showed absolutely no signs of drunkenness when, minutes later, they came out of the trance. This is one of the things that regularly happens in voodoo-type rituals in South America and the Caribbean. Phenomena similar to those described above have been observed in many other cultures throughout the world.
In recent years, one phenomenon of this kind has been demythologized for the Western mind. Descriptions of ceremonies in which participants walked barefoot across several yards of glowing embers, with temperatures reaching 1200 to 1400 degrees Fahrenheit, were once debunked in the West as unsubstantiated fairy tales. However, in the late 1980s firewalking was brought to the United States from Indonesia and quickly became a New Age fad. Since that time, tens of thousands of people in this country have been able to replicate this feat and burns of any kind have been exceptions rather than the rule. Whether or not firewalking can be explained naturally, this example clearly indicates that our culture’s understanding about what is and is not possible has plenty of room for expansion.
Supernatural Feats of the Yogis
Oriental spiritual literature, particularly Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist, suggests that in advanced stages of their spiritual practice adepts often develop extraordinary abilities, some of them clearly belonging to the realm of the supernatural and miraculous. Among these capacities is an extraordinary mastery of physiological functions that are normally governed by the autonomic nervous system and believed by Western neurophysiologists to be quite beyond our conscious control. Indian yogis have been able to interrupt arterial and venous bleeding, stop their hearts, live without food, and even survive without oxygen. Himalayan hermits have been able to meditate for prolonged periods of time while sitting naked in ice and snow. The Tibetan Tantric exercise known as Tum-mo can produce within a short time span an astonishing increase of body temperature. A practitioner of this method can sit in ice and snow and develop so much body heat that it is sufficient to dry wet sheets.
Like the reports about firewalking, descriptions of similar feats used to be taken with a grain of salt by Western scientists, in spite of the fact that Indian researchers had published studies confirming many of these claims. In the last two decades, however, important experiments in this area were conducted in the West and reported by scientists with impressive credentials. Some of the best studies of this kind originated in the laboratories of the prestigious Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. In the early 1970s, doctors Elmer and Alyce Green working at Menninger’s began to examine these ancient claims and to measure and document the effects of spiritual practices. Their research represents a unique combination of deep knowledge of the transpersonal realm, sophisticated electronic equipment, and rigorous Western research techniques.
One of the first subjects of the Greens was an Indian yogi Swami Rama. He was able to produce within a few minutes and under laboratory conditions a temperature difference of eleven degrees Fahrenheit between two thermistors attached to the left and right sides of his palm. In other tests focusing on his cardiovascular system, Swami Rama was able to slow his heart rate from 93 beats per minute down to the low 60s in a matter of seconds. In a particularly dramatic test, he actually stopped the flow of blood through his heart by producing an atrial flutter of about 306 beats per minute, lasting for sixteen seconds. Immediately after the experiment, the Swami’s heart rate returned to normal and he was fully alert, laughing and joking with the researchers. In addition to controlling the heart rate, blood flow, and body temperature at will, Swami Rama performed a number of other feats for the Greens’s research staff.
In one highly controlled experiment, where he was draped and masked so that there could be no question of his using his breath to accomplish this feat, he was able to move a compass-like device that was several feet away from him by using only the power of his mind. He repeated this experiment twice, moving the object ten degrees on its axis every time. Swami Rama was also able to produce cysts in the large muscles of his body within a matter of seconds and have them disappear in about the same time. One of them was excised and medically validated. The Swami claimed that the “soft tissue” of the body was very easy to manipulate and that tumors could be produced and made to disappear by the power of the mind. At a demonstration in Chicago, he was able to make the subtle energy of his chakras visible to the audience; several Polaroid photos by observers documented this phenomenon.
The Greens’s research at the Menninger Foundation has continued over the past two decades and has by now included hundreds of subjects, ranging from Indian medicine men like Rolling Thunder to a number of Eastern spiritual teachers. The “Western yogi” Jack Schwarz from Oregon, besides demonstrating his ability to accurately diagnose medical conditions by reading the patients’ auras, showed an amazing capacity to control his brain wave activity, blood flow, and healing processes. The Greens’s investigations in this area contributed to the development of biofeedback techniques that have helped thousands of people get permanent relief from migraine headaches, certain types of disorders of the circulatory system including high blood pressure, and even epilepsy.
The possibility of controlling many involuntary functions (in medicine it is now called biofeedback training) has now been accepted by Western science. As a result, scientists no longer think of this phenomenon as impossible but discuss it in the context of the medical model—with the exception of some extreme forms, such as living without food and oxygen, where the skepticism remains. However, other claims of supernatural powers (siddhis) exercised by the yogis continue to challenge traditional science. These include the ability to materialize and dematerialize various objects and even one’s own body, move physical objects by the power of one’s mind, project oneself to remote locations at will, appear in two places at the same time (bilocation), and levitation. The existence of such seemingly impossible phenomena remains to be confirmed or refuted by future research. However, in view of the discoveries in quantum physics concerning the relationship between consciousness and matter, even these no longer appear to be as preposterous as they once were.
Laboratory Research of Psychokinesis
There is a growing body of data, drawn from modern scientifically validated experimentation, that supports the existence of psychokinesis; however, these findings continue to be controversial. The reason for this is that even the most careful and meticulous research of our day is met with great resistance if it seems to support a “supernormal” reality, that is, one that does not conform to the Newtonian model. Psychokinesis has been documented in numerous laboratory experiments with methodology ranging from simple dice-throwing devices to designs using emission of electrons in radioactive decay, sophisticated electronic gadgets, and modern computers. There have been even successful experiments with living targets, for example attempts to psychokinetically heal animals, plants, tissue cultures, and enzymes, and even to stop and reactivate the heart of a frog that had been removed from its body.
Of special interest has been the work with exceptionally gifted individuals such as Nina Kulagina, a Soviet psychic. Under laboratory conditions she has demonstrated the ability to move macroscopic objects by simply concentrating on them.9 In another laboratory demonstration, an American by the name of Ted Serios was able to project his mental pictures on the film inside a camera, which was later developed, producing clear photographs of scenes he had held in his mind.10 One of the most controversial phenomena of this kind has been the psychokinetic bending of spoons and other metal objects, introduced into the United States by the Israeli psychic Uri Geller. The events surrounding his performances seem to demonstrate particularly well the trickster quality of psychoid experiences that I discussed earlier. While capable of the most astonishing feats in some seances, he was caught cheating in others. There are many stories describing how electronic instruments used by the laboratory to record experimental data often failed in the most critical moments or how significant things tended to happen outside of the reach of video cameras set up to document his work. While Uri’s own psychokinetic abilities were seriously questioned, children in the United States, Europe, and Japan, inspired by his television demonstrations were able to master the art of spoon-bending. In spite of all the confusion that surrounds him, it is difficult to imagine that everything associated with Uri Geller’s case has been a product of trickery and sleight of hand.
I would like to mention here a story that illustrates the sorts of problems researchers face in their efforts to document phenomena of this kind. My brother Paul, who is a psychiatrist living in Canada, was working at McMasters University in Hamilton. He was asked to be present as a professional witness in Uri Geller’s meeting with Canadian journalists. At one point, Geller was asked to guess and reproduce simple drawings that journalists had drawn on small pieces of paper and then concealed in sealed envelopes. Although he tried, Uri himself was unable to perform this feat. However, at that moment my brother began having vivid mental images and he was able to perform the task in his stead. I have to emphasize that my brother does not think of himself as a psychic. He never did anything of this kind before or after the Uri Geller meeting. He himself felt as if some kind of energy field was transferred from Uri to him.
The Unexplored Territory
We can conclude this section on psychoid experiences by stating that references in the mystical literature, observations from modern consciousness research, as well as laboratory data amassed in the United States, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, strongly suggest the existence of connections between individual consciousness and the world of matter that seriously challenge our culture’s view of reality. I believe that systematic and unbiased study of psychoid phenomena and transpersonal experiences will eventually lead to a revision of our view of reality that will be equal in scope to the Copernican revolution or the shift from Newtonian to quantum-relativistic thinking in physics.