Foreword

FOOTNOTES
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1. One of the early psychic researchers, the distinguished English philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), noted, “We have done all we can when the critic has nothing left to allege except that the investigator is in [on] the trick. But when he has nothing else left to allege, he will allege that” (1882, 12). The pseudocritics began doing that a long time ago. I always take it as a compliment to my experimental design when they end up claiming that I must be incompetent or that my subjects or I must’ve cheated. RETURN

2. Readers who are familiar with some of my other writings on a dualistic approach to mind will notice that I'm using somewhat simpler terminology here that’s not completely consistent with my earlier terminology. Unfortunately, I’m following in the footsteps of most authors on the subject of consciousness in that I’m using inconsistent terminology, but I hope that the way it’s expressed here is adequate to convey my main point. RETURN

3. This chapter was originally published in a slightly different form as "A Case of Predictive Psi, with Comments on Analytical, Associative and Theoretical Overlay," Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 55(814): 263-270, © 1989 by the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Reprinted by permission. RETURN

4. This class, “Psychology 137: Altered States of Consciousness,” was a large lecture course with a lot of conceptual material to cover, and I had little time to even suggest psychological exercises to the students, much less carry them out in class. There were two demonstrations I usually presented early in the course to demonstrate the constructed nature of perception, however, and either or both of these may be what Mrs. Coudetat was implicitly referring to. In the first demonstration, a homework exercise, you look in a mirror and mark the top and bottom of your head’s reflection on the mirror, then step to the side and see that the size of your head as you marked it seems to be only half the size of the head you perceived in the mirror. Students usually find this quite amazing, for their heads were clearly normal size when they looked at their reflections! In the second demonstration, performed in class, we listened to a tape created by consciousness researcher John Lilly that contained a single word, “cogitate,” repeated over and over again, with instructions to listen for interpolated words and write them down. Actually there were no interpolated words, but normal people hear many because of auditory and cognitive fatigue. I taught then, and continue to teach, that much of what we take for granted as simply real, as a straightforward perception of reality, is a semi-arbitrary construction, so the things we take for granted should be systematically examined. RETURN

5. One of the puzzling and saddening experiences of my career as a university professor has been the degree to which students develop fantasies that professors don’t want to talk with them. Perhaps some professors don’t, but I’ve always been friendly to students in class, repeatedly conveying my office hours when students could drop in to chat, make appointments if those hours didn’t work for them, and so on. A few students always took advantage of my office hours, and we had interesting chats, but I always found too many suddenly speaking to me after class at the end of the quarter who revealed that they’d long wanted to ask me about something or other but couldn’t bring themselves to come by my office because they knew that professors didn’t want to waste their valuable time with “dumb” students like them. RETURN

6. Sometimes it’s hard not to play with the idea, without knowing whether or not I’m really serious, that the universe psychically plays with us. In preparing the final manuscript of this book, for instance, I kept semi-consciously puzzling over the two references to Disembody 1970 and Disembody 1982 in this text, copied from an earlier article—an odd name for a psychoanalyst, I thought. It was only when I reached the editing stage of completing the references and couldn’t find anyone named Disembody in my reference database that I went back to the original printed journal article and found that Eisenbud had somehow been transposed by my computer into Disembody. Since Eisenbud died in 1999, he certainly is disembodied now. RETURN

7. I must sadly admit that my hope of inspiring other parapsychologists to explore and write about their deeper motivations and psychological characteristics has still not been fulfilled. In almost all published reports, parapsychologists implicitly present themselves as completely objective scientists motivated only by a desire for truth and pure intellectual curiosity. Since it’s clear that the very idea of psychic connections between people makes experimenters integral parts of experiments, rather than detached observers, all our literature is thus glaringly incomplete in its description of what happened. RETURN

8. Freud theorized that our minds can usefully be classified in three ways as ego, the realistic part of the conscious mind; as id, the instinctual, animal desires we have; and as superego, a kind of socially and individually conditioned watchdog above, “super” to the ego. The superego mechanically watches what we think, feel, and do, and can punish us with guilt and anxiety when we violate its norms. RETURN

9. When I performed this shamanic-healing procedure, my attitude was to suspend disbelief for the time being and do what I could. While I can sometimes suspend doubt fairly effectively in this way, intellectual doubt usually creeps in later, hopefully when it’s too late for such doubt to block the effect I’m trying for. RETURN

10. In a survey I did in 1979 among experienced parapsychologists (Tart 1979b), “occasionally” meant that about a third of their experiments produced significant evidence for various forms of psi phenomena, rather than one in twenty, expected by chance. RETURN

11. This procedure doesn’t allow you to know whether or not you were correct on each call, of course, because doing that makes the statistics much more complicated since you’d obviously change your guesses to “black,” for example, if you knew from feedback that most of the red cards had already come up. RETURN

12. If you really want to know, the exact probability (binomial calculation) of getting all fifty-two or none correct is 4,503,599,627,370,702 to 1, which we can round off as 4 quadrillion to 1.Thanks to Richard Shoup and York Dobyns, who calculated this for me. RETURN

13. There are even more sophisticated statistical tests that can look for significant patterns in the data other than simply hitting (or missing) beyond chance expectation, such as shifts in the expected variance patterns, but we’ll stick with simple hitting or missing here, because that’s enough to make the points. RETURN

14. And yes, the evidence for learning better telepathy or better control of ESP ability from my work has also been ignored by almost everyone, including parapsychologists, for reasons I consider largely irrational. You can find references to these criticisms and my refutations of them in my works 1977b, 1978, 1979a, and 1980. I’m biased, of course, but I believe I’m right in this instance. I used to be somewhat disappointed and angry about this, but lately it’s been more interesting to wonder why this kind of strange ignoring or resisting happened. RETURN

15. I simplify here since training for psi ability isn’t our major focus, but those who want detailed accounts of rationale and results should see Tart 1976, 1983, and 1977b; and Tart, Palmer, and Redington 1979a and 1979b. RETURN

16. RNGs can be constructed in several ways, such as using the arrival time of cosmic rays (which is random) to trigger a Geiger counter to the simpler style used in this study, known as an “electronic roulette wheel.” Why does an ordinary, mechanical roulette wheel come to an unpredictable, random stop? All the mechanical forces acting on it could, in principle, be computed and the outcome be predicted, but in practice a human’s sensory ability to predict or control these forces is way too low. For a roulette-wheel type of RNG, a fast oscillator is cycling an electronic counter through its whole range (zero to nine, in this case) over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times a second. If you could control the length of your button press to a sufficient level of accuracy, you could deliberately select the next number, but the numbers on the counter change much, much faster than your nervous system can control your muscles, so the outcome is random.

A simple demonstration is to use your digital watch as an RNG. If it has a timer function that reads out to the nearest hundredth of a second, then start the timer going, look away a few seconds, and stop it without looking at it. You might have some luck controlling the second where it stops, and you may even have a little control over the tenth of a second, but the hundredth digit will be a random choice. RETURN

17. You can’t give immediate feedback of right or wrong when using a closed (a fixed number of each possibility) deck of cards as the targets, because the knowledge gained from the feedback allows the percipient to rationally improve her strategy, as in knowing what cards have already been played in ordinary card games. An electronic RNG, though, is like an infinitely large deck of cards, an open deck: knowing what has already come up doesn’t affect the odds as to what might come up next, so feedback doesn’t mess up the statistics. RETURN

18. Here’s an “interesting” sidelight on the social dynamics of scientism’s prejudice against open investigation of the paranormal: my grant application was turned down by a major scientific-funding organization. It was their practice to include the comments their anonymous referees had made in evaluating it. All the comments were negative and, to my mind, prejudiced and shallow. Months later I met a prominent psychologist at a national convention, who asked me how my grant application had gone; he’d really liked the proposal. I had no idea he even knew I’d made such an application. It turned out that he’d been one of the referees and that his response had been enthusiastic but had disappeared from the reviews by the time they were sent me. RETURN

19. As with telepathy, things get more conceptually complicated. I’ve given you the operational definition, the procedure to define clairvoyance, namely psi perception of a shielded target when the information doesn’t exist in someone else’s mind at the time of the perception. Sometimes what we label clairvoyance might be precognition, though, either telepathically of the information existing in someone else’s (for example, the experimenter’s) mind in the future or in the percipient’s own mind in the future, as described in the next chapter. RETURN

20. SRI is now officially named SRI International. While it was originally part of Stanford University, it had become an independent research center long before the RV research began. RETURN

21. Many card-guessing studies were done over the years where the exact contribution of telepathy versus clairvoyance versus precognition couldn’t be assessed, so the process was simply referred to as “GESP,” for “general extrasensory perception.” Remote viewing with a beacon person is technically a form of GESP. RETURN

22. Half jocularly and half seriously, for psychology students I like to define the field of psychology as the study of college sophomores by former college sophomores for the benefit of future college sophomores. RETURN

23. We also applied the PPP to the responses of the percipients, which were much more biased, as we expected, than the RNG’s outputs. Interestingly, the more predictable percipients’ responses were, the lower their ESP scores. This makes sense psychologically, for having biases about the way numbers behave is a restriction to opening up to ESP when the targets are indeed random. RETURN

24. While running down the street naked and shouting “Eureka!” would get you in trouble in most parts of the world, I find it amusing that since I live in California, I might be able to get away with such behavior. It’s like when my Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sogyal Rinpoche once described a Tibetan growth exercise to help you break through deep inhibitions, called rushen, where you go alone to an isolated place, take off all your clothes, and run around doing crazy things! But then he reflected that in California this exercise probably wouldn’t have much effect on you at all; it’s too “normal.” RETURN

25. My first two feedback studies were done with the assistance of student colleagues, enrollees in my experimental psychology course. With considerable success, I followed a teaching philosophy that students would learn more and be more interested if they worked with me on a real experiment that could advance knowledge, rather than cut-and-dried replications of previous research. But the department stopped scheduling me to teach this course. Resistance? Perhaps. I’d also applied for a major research grant that would’ve opened new avenues on feedback training, but it wasn’t given, and, as described in chapter 6, the apparent prejudice in denying it was discouraging. RETURN

26. Crookes was knighted in 1897 in recognition of the eminent services he’d rendered to the advancement of scientific knowledge, and was further honored in 1910 by the bestowal of the Order of Merit. In 1898 he became president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Bristol, and in 1913 he was elected president of The Royal Society. Once his support of the paranormal nature of D. D. Home’s gifts became known, though, he was reviled in mainstream scientific circles. RETURN

27. I’ve omitted the more detailed drawing in Crooke’s original report due to space limitations. You can find the complete report online at 209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:MlPdcRFUgYUJ:www.snu.org.uk/Images/pdfs/Sir%2520Crooks.pdf+d+d+home+crooks+accordion&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us RETURN

28. Much thought was given to possible distortions of results due to mechanical imperfections or biases in dice, and specially machined dice have been used, but this systematic rotation of target faces handles the bias problem quite adequately. Any bias works against you as much as it might work for you. RETURN

29. I wish to thank Russell Targ, who devised this exceptionally effective shock-mounting system for his research with lasers. RETURN

30. British physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867) discovered that electrical charges remain on the outside of metallic boxes or cages, no matter how intense they are. A Faraday cage is any electrically conducting enclosure that you put your apparatus inside of to shield it from external electrical fields. Why this should have any effect on psi ability makes no sense in terms of conventional physics, but there’s evidence that it does. Since psi ability itself makes no sense in terms of conventional physics, this doesn’t bother me. Empirically there seems to be an effect, one of the many maybes, perhaps. RETURN

31. We can only approximate the precise probability figures here for the following reasons. Puharich’s records of this particular experiment have been misplaced, so the data depend only on my memory of the test. I recall clearly that his mother (visiting at that time) was given the silver dollar used in the experiment and conducted several hundred trials for coin bias, trials that showed the bias of the coin to be about .55 in favor of heads, rather than a perfect .50. Some data published by Puharich, however, indicate that the bias may have been as high as .72 (Puharich 1962). Using the latter figure as a more conservative estimate of bias, the performance of 100 heads in 100 trials is still exceptionally significant, the critical ratio (unit normal deviation) being greater than 6.2, and the associated probability figure being less than about 10 to the minus 9. RETURN

32. This sounds a lot like the card tricks that magicians do, of course, but there’s a huge difference between a magician’s controlling conditions to make it merely look as if things couldn’t happen and an experimenter’s controlling them. With respect to the classical card-guessing test results, for example, no magician has ever volunteered to come to a parapsychological laboratory and be tested in the standard ways that have evolved to eliminate trickery and sensory cues. RETURN

33. For example, “eternity,” a term used in many spiritual writings, can be simplistically interpreted to mean just an infinitely long period of time, but sometimes it’s probably better interpreted as referring to an entirely different way of perceiving or conceiving of time than we ordinarily do. RETURN

34. In my first publication about OBEs (1968), I coined the acronym “OOBE” for them, Out Of Body Experience. A journal editor, the late parapsychologist John Beloff, corrected me when I submitted a later article: you don’t capitalize the o in “of” when you create an acronym. It was too late, though, even though I’ve used the proper acronym “OBE” ever since. The OOBE acronym had spread into the world, with people pronouncing it as if it were a word (“ooh-bee”), and hundreds came up to me after lectures over the years to tell me about their “ooh-bees.” RETURN

35. There are more academic distinctions made in the article previously referred to, which was based on a paper I presented at a Parapsychological Association meeting, but they need not concern us here. As a humorous aside, I did create a category of pseudo-classical discrete out-of-body experience, and my friend and colleague Stanley Krippner accused me of following up my creation of the “ooh-bee” with the “Scooby Dooby.” RETURN

36. I was still relatively young and new to research then and spoke of “subjects” rather than coexperimenters or percipients, following the current fashions of the time without realizing that this kind of language created particular psychological conditions and them versus us divisions that might bias studies. RETURN

37. I recorded two channels, frontal to vertex and vertex to occipital on the right side of the head, recording continuously through the night on a Grass model VII polygraph at a paper speed of ten millimeters per second. RETURN

38. There is indeed a book (RAND Corporation 1955) containing a million random numbers. Besides making good bedtime reading for people who have trouble getting to sleep, it had many uses in generating random sequences for experiments before we all had computers that could generate pseudorandom numbers. RETURN

39. Standard sleep-laboratory procedures leave enough slack in the wires running to the electrodes on a person’s head so that he can turn over with ease, but if he tries to sit up more than a little, he’ll pull electrodes off, making the electrodes susceptible to picking up power-line interference, which will vibrate the recording pens so hard that they throw ink all over the recording room, as well as leave a distinctive trace on the polygraph record. RETURN

41. Indeed his manuscript had seen sitting with the literary agent he’d hired for more than a year, with no indication of any interest from publishers. I thought this was disgraceful; either publishers were overlooking an important book or his literary agent wasn’t really doing enough. So I sent a copy of the manuscript to an editor I knew, Bill Whitehead at Doubleday, who later published the book. Bill later told me that he took the manuscript home to read, started it after dinner, found he was still reading, fascinated, at two in the morning, but then forced himself to stop reading. He had just reached the “how to do it” chapter, and was not at all sure that he wanted to have an OBE. RETURN

42. Monroe had already had a number of experiences where, while having an OBE, he felt he was in telepathic communication with people in the ordinary world, but they never remembered it when he asked about it later! Frustrated, he had then once pinched a friend who was in her ordinary state while he was out, hoping this would fix the memory. When he later asked her about what she had been doing at that time, she had no memory of his visit, but she did remember a sudden pain in her side and showed Monroe a bruise that had appeared. RETURN

43. Monroe had long been separating his OBEs into “local” ones in which he seemed to be someplace in ordinary reality and thus might be able to check on his perceptions, versus “nonlocal” ones where the locale was clearly not of this earth. RETURN

44. Reprinted with permission from Charles T. Tart, "A Second Psychophysiological Study of Out-of-the-Body Experiences in a Gifted Subject," International Journal of Parapsychology, 9:251-258. RETURN

45. The TV monitoring equipment was already set up for other purposes, and I think we had vague hopes of seeing something ghostlike emerge from Monroe’s body if he had an OBE, but we didn’t see anything unusual and turned it off after the first reported OBE, because Monroe felt uncomfortable being watched. RETURN

46. I won’t refer to all of this literature, but for a good sampling, see Alvarado 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1989; Blackmore 1984; Gabbard 1984; Gackenbach 1991; Green 1968; Grosso 1976; Irwin 1985; Irwin 1988; Krippner 1994; McCreery 1995; Morris 1974; Osis 1980; Osis 1977; Palmer 1994; Palmer 1974; Rogo 1978; Stanford 1987; Walsh 1989. RETURN

47. I must confess to having fun in demonstrating this theory when lecturing, as I suddenly throw a blackboard eraser toward my students and only the one or two who are actually on the trajectory duck, while the close others aren’t in the least excited. It brings the point home nicely. RETURN

49. One critic (Augustine 2007) has argued that she might have been able to hear the doctor’s statement with her normal hearing because she was inadequately anesthetized. As I responded (Tart 2007), I tried listening to hundred-decibel music with ordinary muff-type headphones while my wife spoke loudly in the room beside me, and although I was fully conscious, with no disadvantage of clouding of any sort by drugs, I couldn’t make out a word she said. I have normal hearing but a hundred decibels is literally deafening. RETURN

50. It looked as if a second comparable case had appeared just at the time of this writing (Hamilton 2008), but rumors in the parapsychological community are that this is a composite case rather than an actual one, and so of no evidential value. My attempts to contact Dr. Hamilton have received no reply. RETURN

51. From the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche and edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey. Copyright © 1993 by Rigpa Fellowship. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins publishers. RETURN

52. My testing to see if immediate feedback would increase ESP scores accidentally produced a fascinating case study of this. A young woman who didn’t believe in ESP nevertheless made enough almost hits, interesting-looking displacements, that her experimenter wanted to give her individual test sessions in the second phase of the study. She was tested, and on the ten-choice trainer scored a little below chance on correct hits, but well above chance if you looked at either her clockwise or counterclockwise spatially displaced responses; that is, if the target was, say, an eight, she was low on calling eights but high on sevens and nines. Her scores were so significant this way that her experimenter invited her to take part in the formal training study, figuring she could learn to correct her displacements. She was shocked to be asked back; she didn’t believe in ESP and thought her low scores confirmed her belief. When told she had spatially displaced plus or minus one, she buckled down in the study and, not realizing we would explore all displacements rather than just plus or minus one, now showed a displacement pattern as far away as possible from the correct targets (Tart 1976). RETURN

54. I once suggested to the investigators carrying on Stevenson’s work that it would be quite interesting to start marking a lot of corpses with the equivalent of bar codes, so that if any children later claimed to have been incarnations of these folks, we would have a clear biological marker. I wasn’t sure, nor were they, whether I was serious or indulging in black humor. RETURN

55. From Allan Smith and Charles T. Tart , "Cosmic consciousness experience and psychedelic experiences: A first person comparison. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5(1):97-107. RETURN