When Jung addressed Basel University in 1905 calling spiritualism a religious movement that champions a “scientific” hypothesis and went on to hope that it could ultimately integrate our view of the psyche — if only science will get busy and conquer the field — he summarized the place where we still stand more than 100 years later. We are still divided over what to make of spiritualism and ESP. When we see them as requiring something akin to religious faith, we render their claims “unreal” in the sense of being unavailable for scientific study. When we dismiss them as deliberate acts of fraud or innocent tricks of the unconscious, we render them unworthy of any study at all. When most earnest about parapsychology, we take the position of the thirty-year-old Jung: the phenomena should be studied in all seriousness, and their day will come.

          As we shall see in this chapter, that day has come in the sense that a great deal of good scientific work has been done. But it still lies a long way off in the sense that educated, serious-minded people are still expected to “know better.” Those who “believe that stuff” are considered gullible. More to the point, as anthropologist C. Roderick Wilson puts it, we have no hypothesis to test, and this leaves us with no way of deciding what our data mean (C. R. Wilson, 1998: 197f). Parapsychologists do not doubt that ESP events occur, but they still have no explanation for how they come about, and they do not know what questions to ask. ESP remains unthinkable, even though it clearly happens.

          It seems likely that the testable hypothesis will have to come from another field of investigation, probably astrophysics or quantum mechanics. It will have to be a field whose findings are substantiated by mathematics, for this is the only thing we in the West take for proven. Second, it will have to take a holistic shape, like electro-magnetism and space-time, a relatively simple picture that has room for everything. Third, it will have to be a principle which includes consciousness in the structure of the universe. Western materialistic science has no place for consciousness. Although it obviously exists, it is an embarrassing reality, an add-on to our picture of the cosmos. When we learn to visualize reality in a manner that includes consciousness, the phenomena of parapsychology will far less problematic. For, in the end, they are attributes and capabilities of consciousness.

          We might begin by observing that consciousness belongs to organisms, seemingly only to organisms. Indeed, it seems clear that the degree of an organism’s consciousness depends entirely on the complexity of its physical structure. Consciousness would therefore seem to be an organismic function currently missing from our picture of the universe, best described as an organismic field, like Jung’s psychoid field.

          An organismic field may be just the sort of holistic image necessary to make sense of quantum chaos, the paradox of non-locality and the well-known fact that the observer affects what is observed in the micro-realm. At the other end of the scale in the macro-realm, astronomy struggles to understand the expansion of the universe and the clustering of galaxies — problems that have led it to postulate the existence of dark matter and dark energy. If the cosmos itself turns out to resemble an organism that gathers galaxies into clusters and solar systems into galaxies, many problems may be solved.

          When we have a testable model of a single organizing field that unites galaxies, planets, ecosystems, primates, protozoa, molecules and subatomic particles, it will become clear that the everyday realities today’s science has no place for — life, consciousness and parapsychology — all arise from qualities inherent in a universal principle, namely that each entity nests within a larger entity, as the liver in a vertebrate body, a planet in a solar system, an electron in an atom. Such a discovery will spell out the details of Jung’s psychoid field, just as modern evolutionary biology, neuroscience, archaeology and ethology have clarified the hypothesis of the archetypes. A field so specified would then be testable with experiments rather more sophisticated than those Rupert Sheldrake has proposed in Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (2002).

          While we wait for a unifying model to emerge, however, we can look at the history of parapsychological investigations and the variety of roles they have played in Western societies. Their status today is still unclear. In some laboratories statistical verification of non-ordinary phenomena has grown steadily stronger. In others, some with financial support from government agencies, a strong case has been made that ESP is a normal human capability that can be developed and refined with training. This chapter will provide an overview of the contemporary field of parapsychology. The next will take up some proposals that might lead to a useful hypothesis.

Parapsychology in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

          Parapsychology has never been a neutral, merely factual realm of experimentation and study. From the beginning its significance has been entangled with issues of social status and manipulation. Demonstrations of psychic powers have functioned as symbolic claims to authority on the basis of class, or as a means to undermine those claims. Battles over who should be in charge of demonstrations and where they should take place have had much to do with the ambitions of the scientific and medical establishments to claim territory, expertise and financial advancement. Struggles over the validity of psychics’ claims have to be seen in the light of social turmoil. Bertrand Méheust, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Picardie, has published a huge two-volume study (1999) of “Somnambulism and Mediumship” in France from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries as well as a later more accessible study (2003) of a single psychic, Alexis Didier (1826-1886) based on an exhaustive study of every available contemporary document concerning this “prodigious seer.” On the other side of the Channel, the role played by Mesmerism in the dynamics of Victorian society has been described by Alison Winter, Associate Professor of History in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of the California Institute of Technology (1998).

Mediumship in France. Rumors of psychic powers suggesting “the hidden secrets of nature” began to invade Europe in the seventeenth century, when the first reports of shamanism in Siberia were published. Fears that the Church would retaliate with accusations of witchcraft and the devil, however, forced serious investigators to “adulterate their findings,” resulting in a hodge-podge of fact and fiction (Flaherty, 1992: 21). A century later, Anton Mesmer’s discovery of “magnetic sleep” brought experimentation with altered states of consciousness into public awareness in a brand new and acceptable context. Mesmerism claimed to be a benevolent healing process based on the science of magnetism. This shrewdly removed healing through altered states of consciousness from ecclesiastical control. In the course of his first two years of experimentation (1774-1776), however, Mesmer eased away from the high prestige of physical science as he began to suspect that the mysterious agent of change in “animal magnetism” emanated not from magnetized iron but from his own body (Crabtree, 1993: 3-10). This discovery that hypnosis was in some mysterious way based in human relationship set the stage for its multifarious roles in social experimentation. Psychics and their animal magnetizers became celebrity-pairs.

          The age of the celebrity psychic began in 1784 when the Marquis de Puységur began experimenting with Mesmerism to occupy himself and entertain his troops. Victor Race, a young peasant suffering from an inflammation of the chest entered into a trance where an alter ego could foresee the future course of his illness. Puységur found other subjects who responded similarly when they entered an altered state he called “artificial somnambulism.” Within a year he had enough data to publish a book on his experiments that had the “effect of a bomb-shell” (Méheust, 2003: 23). It started a fad of hypnotic experimentation and psychic celebrity in which aristocrats assumed the role of scientific demonstrators. No money exchanged hands, and the demonstrations took place before invited guests in the drawing rooms of the “investigators.” The aristocratic “magnetizer” did not impose his will on his talented subject to work him like a marionette. Rather he gallantly “inspired” a state of “magnetic lucidity” in an individual of lesser worth (Ibid., 170-77). Their ability to magnetize their servants demonstrated the superiority of aristocrats and seemed to validate them as a superior class, conducting scientific experiments as they dispensed magical powers. Writers who reported on the séances were exploring nature “in a romantic-progressive spirit”; and Catholics believed they were witnessing “the recovery of human powers that had belonged to the Garden of Eden” (Ibid., 232f).

          With the onset of the French Revolution little more than a decade later, these aristocratic demonstrations fell out of favor, and the whole matter was forgotten for twenty or thirty years. In 1831, as “animal magnetizers” and their talented psychics began to reappear — this time with a more explicit claim to scientific experimentation — a Commission of Inquiry was appointed by the French Academy of Science. Although it declared the majority of the claims valid, it provoked such incoherent debates over matters of procedure and what might count as experimental success that the Academy closed the door to all discussion of hypnosis in 1842.

          When scientists withdrew from the field, entrepreneurs hungry for fame and money, as well as writers, philosophers and artists found themselves free to explore the phenomena unhindered by restraints of method. The new magnetizers, assumed pseudo-aristocratic power by ostentatiously dominating their lower-class clairvoyants. Many of the entranced, however, found hypnosis to be a wonderful tool for overturning the power structure, and “in a state of magnetic lucidity took ascendancy over their masters” (Ibid., 173). Thus experiments in parapsychology departed more and more from the ideals of science as they became subsumed to the political hopes and confusions of the day.

          In the sixteen-year period (1842-1858) between the fall of the French Monarchy and the start of the Second Empire, Alexis Didier, a true “hero of magnetic lucidity” enjoyed his public career. Méheust presents Didier as “an Icaros of the spirit who beats his wings and wants to break free of the human condition,” the most complete and subtle somnambulist as well as the best documented. A famous picture from 1847 shows Alexis with his “magnetizer,” Jean-Bon Marcillet, a formidable old officer of the Guard, haughtily dispensing “magnetic fluid” upon a frail, blindfolded youth reading from a closed book held before his shrouded face (Ibid., 21-3).

          At the same time that Alexis Didier was both victim and hero of the civic chaos surging around him, his public séances threatened a fledgling science only beginning to establish its goals and methods. Animal magnetism, now rather removed from the realm of physics, borrowed instead from the imagery of the latest technology: the telegraph’s communication over great distances (telepathy) and the daguerreotype’s optical precision (clairvoyance). With a hood over his head to assure witnesses that he was not using his eyes to gather subtle cues, Alexis would describe the contents of sealed envelopes, and read from a book he had never seen before, opened to a random page by his interrogator. The latter would be a third person on the stage alongside Alexis and Marcillet, often the individual who had requested the séance. Sometimes the performance would open by introducing the interrogator, a complete stranger, to Alexis. Entering hypnotic trance, Alexis frequently described the interrogator’s home or a favorite painting hanging in it. Sometimes he identified the location of lost objects. Méheust carefully analyzes every document left by contemporary observers and commentators on the séances, and concludes, “It is very probable that Alexis had, at least in part, at certain moments, the powers he claimed to have” (Ibid., 418).

          Alexis Didier’s stage career ended when the scientific community reclaimed the practice of hypnosis as a diagnostic and healing tool. In 1882 Jean Martin Charcot used his prestige as one of the world’s foremost neurologists to reopen the Academy of Science to hypnotic explorations, by painting the altered states of somnambulism as pathological and related to hysteria. What resulted from this new, more medical excitement was the psychology of dissociation that Jung calls the “French School” as well as parlor experiments in table turning, communicating with spirits, clairvoyance, telepathy, and psychokinesis.

          For Méheust, “The singularity of Alexis’ ‘magnetic’ clairvoyance resides in the fact that a fugitive equilibrium was realized between tendencies about to go their separate ways, between factual demonstration and a spiritualist approach to the world, between a reality that is human and one that has been purified and constructed in the laboratory” (Ibid., 195). Méheust takes the view that spontaneous manifestations of ESP are far more significant and revealing than those produced by the likes of J. B. Rhine. At the same time, pathologizing them in the spirit of Charcot amounts to the denial of a significant human capability. Méheust gives us a phenomenology of magnetic lucidity and takes to task the philosophers, anthropologists and others who refuse to investigate “one of the greatest taboos in modern times; it has withstood the hunt for taboos that has been an essential part of the second half of the twentieth century, and is today stronger than ever” (Ibid., 460). “If, indeed, métagnomie [the super-knowledge of lucid trance] exists, we Westerners do not escape from illusion in rejecting it. . . . [It] would allow us to escape from our cultural dead end and envisage a richer and very different [psyche and world]” (Ibid., 472-3).

Mesmerism in Victorian society. Alison Winter takes an entirely different approach to the history of Mesmerism and somnambulism from that taken by Méheust. She does not concern herself with the trance states themselves or their truth value but rather with what Victorians thought Mesmerism revealed about who they were or might become. In her hands, it becomes a series of experiments that Victorians were doing on their own society, working out for themselves the nature of influence and authority. In the process, the nature of hypnotism and the human mind became confused and contaminated with a series of social prejudices.

          John Elliotson, professor of medicine at University College Hospital, London, in the late 1830’s tried to show that Mesmerism was a physical reality in which the brain was influenced by an invisible fluid; but his pretensions of scientific objectivity ended in disgrace when his subjects, “a number of sickly, impoverished young girls” made a laughing stock of him (Winter, 1998: 59). Powers that had seemed to be firmly in the hands of the medical practitioner went out of control, as entranced, lower-class subjects — rather in the style of contemporary blackface entertainers — straddled the domestic and the exotic, the authentic and the fraudulent (Ibid., 90). Thomas Wakley, founder and editor of the Lancet, warned by such disgraceful episodes, managed to establish the hospital and the laboratory as the proper places for the medical profession to pursue its expertise and guard its authority.

          Mesmerism influenced theology, literature, orchestral performances, and politics: both Charles Dickens (1812-70) and Richard Wagner (1813-83) studied Mesmerism in order to be able to “orchestrate” the responses of their readers or hearers (Ibid., 314-30). But its biggest influence was always in medicine. In 1843 when James Braid (1795-1860) published his magnum opus, Neurypnology; or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered in Relation to Animal Magnetism, Mesmerism had still not shaken its popular reputation as a demonic force (Ibid., 275). Determined to assimilate the field for science and medicine, Braid made three important changes: he removed all reference to those fanciful “magnetic fluids” that had been talked about since the days of Mesmer; he dispensed with the “magnetic passes” (and their sexual overtones) that supposedly had been essential to induce hypnotic states; and finally he removed references to the notion that one person’s will was imposed upon and came to dominate that of another (Ibid., 185). His work was a great success. Within a very few years Mesmeric societies had been formed in all the major towns of England, and a few specialist journals had been founded. Meanwhile, an opposite effect was occurring due to the popular enthusiasm fueling the rise of spiritualism and psychic research. As a result, the infirmaries declined between 1850 and 1870 (Ibid., 156). The field was splitting between those who treated it as a secular religion and those who were appropriating it for science.

          Even in its medical applications, class issues persisted. In a chapter on the history of anesthesiology, Winter shows that the administration of ether, which was nearly as difficult to use as Mesmerism and far more dangerous, succeeded in becoming the treatment of choice in surgery — not through superior efficacy, but because its usage was considerably less public and therefore remained under the control of the medical profession. Due to the single-minded efforts of James Esdaile in the late 1840’s, Mesmeric anesthesia did succeeded, but only for a time, only in India, and only with lower-class Indian patients. In his Calcutta hospital, Esdaile was able to train a small army of Mesmerizers to prepare his patients for surgery. Eventually, however, the low class of his patients and the “oriental” nature of his activities lost favor with the colonial administration and the practice was halted (Ibid., 163-86). Today in the West the same prejudice attends ASCs, hypnosis, and ESP: the idea that only the intellectually lower class is gullible enough to take them seriously.

          Throughout this history, the issues revolve around who has the power: the upper class, the specialist, the Westerner, and the man; or the patient, the educated commoner, the “oriental,” and the woman. The influential writer Harriet Martineau, ill with a malignant uterine tumor, described the invalid as “a seraph outside the ‘real’ world and looking on,” able to see whole truths undistorted (Ibid., 219). She claimed to have discovered the highest truths while in Mesmeric trance. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Barrett feared her very self would be obliterated through the penetration of the Mesmerizer’s will — at least until she fell in love with Robert Browning and found the language and imagery of Mesmerism aptly to describe the blending of two people in love (Ibid., 240).

          By the end of the century, Mesmerism had not so much declined in importance as been absorbed into other fields: psychic research (the SPR), physiology (Charcot), dissociation psychology (the “French School”), and psychoanalysis. “Modern science . . . [as a set of] clearly demarcated disciplines . . . arguably did not exist before there was a means of training individuals to ask similar questions and pursue similar lines of investigation” (Ibid., 300). Issues of authority and methodology raised by the disputes over Mesmerism played a central role in such demarcation. Although Winter limits herself primarily to the years between 1835 and 1860, she makes it clear that the question of whether psychic claims were true was rarely as important as what they meant for social status and professional prestige.

          In the end, parapsychology operates under a very subtle taboo. It is deemed to be the province of the uneducated, the gullible and the emotionally labile. It has trouble shaking its famous association with spirits and ghosts. Because it inevitably involves what appears to be some sort of action-at-a-distance (psychokinesis), seeing-at-a-distance (clairvoyance), or feeling-at-a-distance (telepathy), it is as easy to overlook or dismiss as were gravity and magnetism in earlier centuries. Newton’s and Faraday’s inexplicable forms of action-at-a-distance at least obeyed mathematical laws. Phenomena associated with the psyche are not so compliant. They show only statistical regularities, rather like the evanescent particles of quantum theory.

Parapsychology in the Laboratory

          It has often been said that “new ideas” go through a predictable course on their way to acceptance. First, they are declared to be impossible. Parapsychology is said to be impossible because it “violate the laws of science.” Later, as more evidence comes in, it is said that the new idea may have some merit, but it is trivial. For parapsychology, this means that results may show performance to be better than chance but only marginally so. General opinion today oscillates between these first two positions. We will shortly see that results have not been trivial. Nevertheless, it is clear that the Western world is not ready for the third stage in accepting parapsychology: that it is important and that its effects are stronger and more pervasive than formerly believed. When our world gets there, however, it will not be long before it moves to the fourth and final position: we have known about parapsychology all along and it is not interesting.

          Dean Radin, Director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, says in his 1997 survey of the field that most researchers in parapsychology today are already at stage three. They are so confident of the evidence for the basic phenomena that they are no longer trying to prove merely that ESP happens; they have moved on to trying to figure out how it does so. Nevertheless, the larger climate is still hostile. For example, in 1984 the U. S. Army Research Institute asked the National Academy of Sciences to evaluate some of its training techniques in the areas of parapsychology, sleep learning, biofeedback and the like. After three years of study the National Research Council held a press conference to declare its most dependable finding, that there has been “no scientific justification for research conducted over a period of 130 years on the existence of parapsychological phenomena” (Radin, 1997: 215).

          Why were the results so bad? It turns out that the two principal investigators had had a long history of publications declaring that parapsychology is not a legitimate science. There were no parapsychologists on the panel. Despite this imbalance, however, their report admits that phenomena exist for which the investigators could find no alternative explanation. In effect they had ignored studies that contradicted their conclusions. When asked why they failed to mention this, they said that they wanted to avoiding sending out “mixed signals” (Ibid., 216). This is the sort of behavior that makes Bernard Méheust so angry about “a reality that has been purified and constructed in the laboratory.” In his two-volume history that deals in large part with nineteenth-century battles over parapsychology in France, he provides many details of how prominent scientists sitting on officially sanctioned committees sabotaged demonstrations of parapsychology so that they would not have had to admit that they had seen something they could not explain (Méheust, 1999). There truly has been and still is a conspiracy of silence.

Research standards. Due to the general disinterest or hostility experienced by parapsychology, the field holds itself to much higher standards than those of mainstream science. Rupert Sheldrake (2002: 170ff) devotes several pages to these sorts of disparities. Dean Radin reports that parapsychology generally considers its results significant when an experiment beats the odds against chance by at least 20:1. Even so, the probability of repeating those results with a fresh group of subjects under the same conditions and following the same procedure is only about fifty percent, “because experiments involving human beings never turn out the same way twice” (Radin, 1997: 47).

          The journals in most of the sciences do not regularly publish so-called “negative results,” what happens when experiments fail to support the hypothesis they were designed to explore. Consequently, failed studies end up in file drawers — what Radin calls the “file-drawer effect.” Because of the skepticism its work arouses, however, parapsychology cannot afford to keep file drawers full of undeclared failed experiments. For this reason, the Parapsychological Association has since 1975 required that every study be published, regardless of outcome. Furthermore, “because it is possible there may still be unreported studies,” Radin’s practice is “to calculate how many unreported studies would be required to nullify the results in the known studies” (Ibid., 80). When that number of hypothetical “file-drawer” studies gets to be huge, the researcher can be quite confident that he is on to something.

          Studies in physics have not been so scrupulous. Radin describes the procedure of the Particle Data Group of the American Physical Society. These are the people who evaluate experimental data regarding subatomic particles. Standard procedure for the Particle Data Group is to discard the data they deem unreliable, usually because the numbers lie too far outside a central cluster of results. In doing so, they may discard as much as forty-five percent of the data (Ibid., 57f). In an extreme case, “the omega-minus particle was considered to be ‘found’ on the basis of only two events out of a total of nearly 200,000 experimental trials” (Ibid., 49). Rupert Sheldrake adds that in the fields he is personally acquainted with — biochemistry, developmental biology, plant physiology, and agriculture — “only about 5-20 percent of the empirical data are selected for publication. He has questioned researchers in other fields, and they report about the same level of file-drawer effect (Sheldrake, 2002: 170).

Meta-analysis. Parapsychology encounters three natural obstacles in getting dependable results: (a) the problem of repeating an experiment with a fresh group of human subjects (“practically no one bothers,” Ibid., 38); (b) the “decline effect” (Rhine’s discovery that the level of performance falls off as boredom increases); and (c) the fact that for practical reasons, including the decline effect, the number of subjects or trials in any given experiment is necessarily small.

          The number of trials or subjects undergoing a trial is the heart of the problem; and on account of the three obstacles just described, that number is always low. To get an idea of what this means, let us take the example of a baseball player’s “batting average” — how many hits he gets for every “at bat” opportunity. At the beginning of the season, he may get eight hits in his first ten “at bats,” giving him a batting average of .800. We will have little confidence in this statistic as a prediction of his future performance. For not only is it extremely rare for a player to have an average above .400, but the number of trials is tiny. Perhaps he will strike out in his next five opportunities and see his average fall to .533. This would still be a very high average with a very low confidence factor. But when he has batted .300 over the course of two or three seasons and had more than 1000 “at bats,” we can have confidence that he is an excellent hitter.

          The same issue of confidence attends statistical studies in the parapsychology laboratory. Suppose we have a hundred independent studies of a certain type of ESP performance, each with only twenty-five trials. Even if each study shows a high level of success — say sixty percent of the time the subject comes up with the right answer, when chance would expect fifty percent — none of the experiments will inspire a great deal of confidence. But when we combine those hundred studies and consider them as a single study of a particular ESP-type performance, we wind up with a population of 2500 trials. Now the sixty percent rate inspires confidence.

          This is what Radin has been up to, using a procedure he calls “meta-analysis.” He begins by collecting all the published studies he can find that address a certain parapsychological phenomenon. After careful inspection of experimental and statistical procedures used in those studies, the types of control and so forth, he determines which studies are compatible for combination. His results are quite impressive.

          To illustrate, skeptical British psychologist, Mark Hansel, has offered a stiff challenge to the field of parapsychology, one he probably thought would never be met: parapsychology will inspire confidence when an experiment can be repeated three times and beat the odds against chance by 100:1.[1] Radin’s meta-analysis enables parapsychology to meet this challenge. The method takes the third, fourth, etc., experiments on the same hypothesis by different experimenters as “repetitions of the experiment,” as they certainly are. And the results are encouraging: “Hansel would be pleased to know that this has been achieved dozens of times, in numerous categories of psi experiments. This is why informed skeptics today agree that chance is no longer a viable explanation for the results obtained in psi experiments” (Ibid., 50).

Spontaneous Psychics: Commonalities

          Stephen E. Braude, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, entered the field of parapsychology for reasons similar to Jung’s. He thought it necessary for a complete philosophy of mind, much as Jung thought it necessary for a complete science of the psyche. Although Braude was cautious enough to wait until after he had tenure to enter the field, he was still surprised at what he found: “Since dipping into the data of parapsychology, I have encountered more examples of intellectual dishonesty than I had previously thought possible. . . . I have seen how scientists are not objective, how philosophers are not wise, how psychologists are not perceptive, how historians lack perspective — not to mention how physicians are not healers, and how attorneys are not committed to justice” (Braude, 1986: ix).

          Braude, in short, is as outraged as Méheust, and like his French counterpart prefers non-experimental or spontaneous evidence of ESP over that produced in the laboratory. He declares that “Rhine’s so-called revolution has failed” because the fence-sitters will always find some reason to resist the evidence; and even if all the skeptics were to accept the existence of psi phenomena, “it is doubtful that further laboratory experiments would yield much enlightenment” (Ibid., 5f). Laboratory experiments are contrived events that have little to do with the real life experience and little if any transformative value. In short, Braude is convinced that psychic experiences really do occur, and he would like to go on from there and try to find out what sort of talent ESP might be and what it tells us about ourselves.

          He wonders to what we might liken ESP. He notes that parapsychologists often seem to assume that the talent for psi is as unremarkable as digesting food or pronouncing words, while it surely must be more like making clever retorts or being able to empathize (Ibid., 56). Its occurrence probably always has to do with a person’s physical or psychological needs. It might be compared with athletic prowess, in that some people seem to be better at it than others, but even the stars need to be in the right frame of mind to perform well. “Analogously, while some people can arouse themselves sexually under almost any conditions, few can do so under laboratory conditions” (Ibid., 10).

Where the mediums are. Unfortunately, it is not easy to find mediums like Alexis Didier today. Braude says, “The overall psychic climate has changed so profoundly since the turn of the [twentieth] century that few today even try to discover whether they have mediumistic abilities” (Ibid., 65). In this context, a “medium” would be an individual who enters an altered state in order to produce non-ordinary phenomena. In the language of the nineteenth century, that would mean a somnambulist, an individual with two or more subpersonalities. The historical record shows clearly that different subpersonalities from the same individual may manifest different physiological states, “including measurable differences in autonomic nervous system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brain-wave evoked potentials” (Radin, 1997: 149).

          Although a hundred and more years ago mediums were fascinated with the idea of communicating with the dead, and dissociated subpersonalities were taken as evidence for it, the hypothesis of ghosts and spirits is not necessary for mediumship. Today’s participant-observer anthropologists have come to a similar conclusion regarding the spirit claims of pre-literate peoples. Although the natives may insist that spirits are in play, the anthropologist can accept the non-ordinary result without accepting the native hypothesis: “What we have called an extraordinary experience probably is not the result of experiencing something from another dimension, but an experience which occurs when one opens oneself to aspects of experience that previously had been ignored or repressed” (Young & Goulet, 1998: 9). This is what studies in parapsychology propose to us: that we consider aspects of experience we have been systematically ignoring.

          While today’s anthropologists struggle to find appropriate words to designate their non-ordinary experiences, nineteenth century investigators described somnambulism with fine differentiation. By my count, Méheust (1999) identifies at least eleven types of somnambulistic talent: hyperesthesias (greatly enhanced sensory acuity); synesthesias (hearing colors, tasting shapes, etc); the ability to see inside one’s own body or inside the body of another; spontaneously feeling another’s pain or emotion; deliberately feeling another’s pain or emotion; clairvoyance; clairaudience; traveling out of body; reading another thoughts; and seeing the future. Shamdasani (2003: 110) provides a list from 1826 that adds another four or five talents: the ability to estimate time, insensibility to exterior sensations, exaltation of the imagination or memory, and hyperdevelopment of the intellectual faculties.

          Although many of these talents do occur today, the most spectacular “packages” of mediumistic abilities are to be found in the historical record. This is hardly a reason for the phenomenologist of mediumship to despair, however, for the data are dependable. The most famous psychics were repeatedly tested by some of the best informed and most skeptical observers of their day, and they left detailed written records. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was extremely strict in its standards — perhaps overly so. Their policy was to eliminate any medium ever found cheating. By all accounts, however, some of the genuine ones did cheat when they were having a bad day. Eusapia Palladino was famous for it, but eventually did get a second and third look from the SPR. The most active investigators for the SPR were people who had come from very religious families but, in the face of science, were no longer able to believe traditional doctrines. They came to hope that parapsychology would convince them of the reality of a soul that survives bodily death. What made them hard-headed skeptics, however, was their determination not to be fooled again (Gauld, 1968: 263). The ASPR, the American branch of the SPR, turned away so many interested supporters for being insufficiently skeptical that the organization failed to survive (Blum, 2006: 263). The literature on the great mediums of the past is extensive and reliable.

          Even the best of the nineteenth-century psychics, however, manifested behavior that seemed to border on the pathological. Great psychics like Alexis Didier and Rudi Schneider were often subject to so many demands for performance — sometimes several in a single day — that they easily became exhausted, began to show symptoms of breakdown, and found their psychic powers diminished. William James was familiar with the problem: “Their abilities if genuine were unreliable and erratic. Even the good ones eventually tended to suffer from the decline effect. The weirdness of their profession often produced mental problems, if those didn’t already exist” (Blum, 2006: 155).

ESP and non-ordinary states. It seems clear that the altered states of consciousness we studied in connection with ritual, shamanism, ayahuasca ingestion, meditation, and the like, have much in common with those of the nineteenth-century mediums. Back then, the most common method of inducing states of psychic receptivity was hypnosis, for the entire somnambulism phenomenon was an outgrowth of Mesmerism. Mesmer himself reported evidence for a “sixth sense” in some of his subjects (Mesmer, 1980: 135). But, as we shall see, some mediums have also employed what appears to be self-taught breathing techniques and the ingestion of alcohol. Furthermore, about half of all spontaneous psi experiences occur when we are in the most common of ASCs, the dream state (Radin, 1997: 68). Because synchronistic dreams are quite common, it is likely that few of us are entirely innocent of ESP.

          All of this implies that our ordinary state of consciousness, although an inconstant thing itself, is the primary obstacle to our experiencing ESP, or recognizing parapsychological experiences when they occur. This Western prejudice is certainly the reason ESP is far less common in the West than elsewhere. Our cultural expectations reinforce the beta brain-wave state that we take to be ordinary, and reject the others as absurd or pathological. Jung recognized this reality in 1919: “If a European had to go through the same experiences and ceremonies which the medicine man performs in order to make spirits visible, he would have the same experiences” (CW8: ¶303).

          Jung’s idea is supported by anthropologist Jean-Guy Goulet. He was in Alaska in July 1984, participating in a pre-ceremony discussion with natives and others when the teepee they were sitting in filled with smoke. Before his smarting eyes, Goulet saw “a detailed life-size image of myself . . . wearing the same clothes I was wearing, kneeling by the fire, fanning the flames with my hat.” Then another non-native got up and began blowing on the fire, whereupon an Elder immediately instructed him to fan it with his hat lest he offend spiritual entities who might cause a violent wind in camp. Goulet was shocked at his apparent telepathic foreknowledge. “Up to that time, I knew neither the right nor the wrong way of fanning a fire, nor the rationale” (Goulet, 1998: 30).

ESP in pre-literate cultures. Australian lay researcher Ronald Rose attempted in the 1950’s to test the hypothesis that non-Westerners would be more familiar with and more adept in psychic experiences. He and his wife conducted a lengthy investigation of Aborigines who had had minimal contact with Whites. His use of J. B. Rhine’s laboratory procedures, the Zener cards and dice, provided only very limited support for his hypothesis. Only one of the Aborigines did well with the cards, an elderly woman called “Granny,” who had expressed doubt about her competence. All the others worked hard, trying to prove that they could succeed, but failed (R. Rose 1956: 221f). It looks as though these latter took it for a Western task that required ego-directed thinking, whereas “Granny” retained her native way of thought.

          Evidence that ESP belongs to the everyday experience of Aborigines is abundant in Rose’s book. For instance, he learned that telepathy is essential for sending “smoke signals.” While Westerners tend to assume that Aborigines and American Indians communicate across canyons with puffs of smoke, like a sort of Morse code, Rose learned that the fire indicates merely that there is a message to be sent. The message itself travels telepathically. Tjalkalieri, Rose’s informant, says: “I would make the smoke so that a man could see it — a good big fire with green boughs that makes good smoke. When he sees it, he knows it is not a camp fire and he gets to thinking. And I am thinking, too, so that he thinks my thoughts” (Ibid., 54).

          Trained anthropologists report that telepathy is ubiquitous in the pre-literate world. Reichel-Dolmatoff found that the Tukano hunters of the Amazonian rain forest say one must never think of the animal one is hunting: “If we think of [the tapir], then she sees us in her thoughts . . . If we want to kill her we must think of other things” (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1997: 115). Similar advice was given to Marie Francoise Guédon during her work with the Dene speakers of Alaska. For example, “Don’t think about the ‘big one’ [the bear] when walking alone in the woods.” At first the advice confused her, but after ten years, “I finally grasped: Thought is communication with other thinking entities and therefore has consequences” (Guédon, 1998: 55).

          Rupert Sheldrake gives an example from naturalist J. Allen Boone, studying monkey behavior in the wild. One day after observing a band of monkeys playing in a clearing and then, with sudden purpose, disappear, he waited to see why they had gone. After three hours, two hunters appeared with rifles. Boone learned, “At the precise moment those two hunters had picked up their rifles and headed for the clearing, three-hours’ walking distance away, every monkey in the clearing had fled from the place” (Sheldrake, 2003: 153).

Psychic contagion. The presence of other people can have a noticeable effect on psychic performance. At an ayahuasca ceremony, for instance, a vegetalista announced that he would like to sit beside Louis Eduardo Luna, “because you have beautiful visions.” Luna says it is common for vegetalistas to “join their visions . . . so as to see better and perform a shamanic task” (Luna, 1986: 151). Similarly, during the Victorian rage for table-tipping, “People said that when a gifted psychic joined in, tables did more than tilt and wobble. They hopped, crackled, hummed like a vibrating string. Some rose into the air, as if being tugged by invisible hands” (Blum, 2006: 20).

          Such contagion can also work the other way, when the presence of skeptics interferes with a psychic’s performance. Regarding Alexis Didier, Méheust says that there was evidently some interference when skeptics were present, but not every time and it was never complete. Sometimes Alexis “could evade the effects of incredulity by having another person in the group, preferably a woman, hold the object” whose contents he was to describe (Méheust, 2003: 448f).

          Even physicists are cognizant of such phenomena. In a 1959 article in Scientific American, the great theoretical physicist George Gamow described what he called the “Pauli Effect”: “The standing of a theoretical physicist is said to be measurable in terms of his ability to break delicate devices merely by touching them. By this standard Wolfgang Pauli was a very good theoretical physicist; apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory” (Radin, 1997: 131).

Studies in Telepathy

          It is often difficult to decide whether a synchronistic event should be categorized as telepathy or clairvoyance. For example, when Alexis Didier accurately describes his interrogator’s living room a couple hundred miles distant from his stage in Paris, was his psyche “visiting” that living room directly or was Alexis reading the mind of his interrogator? Either hypothesis is equally likely. In this section, we will select evidence for incidents that unmistakably involve telepathy and find that they are extremely common. It is instructive to consider not only the evidence that telepathy really occurs but also to see how it fails and what its failures have to tell us.

The feeling of being stared at. In his project to convince the world that we need an organismic theory to account for everyday phenomena in biology and consciousness, Rupert Sheldrake has been working to reveal how common so-called impossible occurrences are. We have a “taboo,” for instance, against investigating whether and how it may be that when someone stares at the back of our head we regularly turn around and look back. Our Western metaphysics tells us that eyes are organs for receiving photons and that they do not send out perceptible rays. Yet we act as if they do. Then we deny it. We say it is only a superstition; or that we have responded not to telepathy but to some very ordinary subliminal cues; or that it was just blind chance that we looked back when we did; or that we selectively remember our successes and forget our failures (Sheldrake, 2003: 137). Thus do we talk ourselves back to respectability.

          Certain professions, however, do not allow us piously to debunk the feeling of being stared at. Sheldrake has found that surveillance personnel “generally agree that when people are being watched or followed, it is important to look directly at them as little as possible” (Ibid., 141). Similarly, during the Second World War, RAF pilots were instructed “not to stare at an enemy pilot when preparing to shoot him down” (Ibid., 125).

          Sheldrake was able to assemble 13,900 being-stared-at trials as a result of publicity gained by his book, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, a program on the Discovery Channel, and an article in New Scientist. He found that staring was detected 55 percent of the time, giving an odds against chance of 10²⁰:1 (Sheldrake, 2003: 171). In a similar experiment conducted in Amsterdam in 1995, subjects scored above chance at 10³⁷⁶:1 (Ibid., 176f). In a 1980 version of the experiment, closed circuit television was used, with one person staring at a monitor in the room next door to the test subject, who sat in range of a television camera. This time, the subject was not asked to identify when she was the object of staring, rather her skin was tested for the galvanic response. It turns out that we register the feeling of being stared at unconsciously in our bodies, even when we are not aware of the fact (Ibid., 183).

          Sheldrake has also gathered information about animals similar to what we have already seen concerning pre-literate hunters trying not to think about their prey. There is overwhelming evidence that dogs and cats know when their owners have decided to head home, and he has accumulated 106 accounts of dogs who responded with distress at the time that a person they were attached to died at some distance from home. The dogs apparently knew about the death long before the news arrived by telephone call or telegram (Ibid., 78).

          A survey of 65 London veterinary clinics revealed that all but one were plagued by frequent cancellations of cat appointments because the cat had suddenly disappeared. The 65^th clinic had ceased making appointments for cats for just this reason. Their new policy was that cat owners could bring their animals in whenever it was convenient (Ibid., 20). Sheldrake includes a related report from American naturalist William Long who watched a family of foxes over a long period of time. The young kits were allowed to caper about in the vicinity of the den. When one of them strayed too far, the vixen would silently stare at it intently. At that point, the kit “suddenly checks himself and turns as if he had heard a command.” Only then does he see her intent look and return “like a trained dog to a whistle” (Ibid., 165).

Mental radio. In 1930 Upton Sinclair published a book that he wrote under the direction of his wife, entitled Mental Radio. It described telepathy experiments she had made. Sinclair says his wife of fifty years, Mary Craig Kimbrough, called “Craig” throughout the book, had shown evidence of powerful intuition and psychic gifts for ESP from her childhood. At the age of forty she suffered a breakdown in health that led her to an intensive study of “what the mind really is” (Sinclair, 1930: 17). In 1927 she witnessed a stage demonstration of telepathy and decided she had to learn how to “read minds.” She hired the young man who had given the demonstration to hypnotize her, but instead of falling under his power, she began to give him mental commands (Ibid., 20f). She realized hypnosis would be no shortcut to her goal and that she would have to devise her own method of telepathy.

          Most of Craig’s experiments were done with the help of her husband. Sinclair would make a set of drawings, wrap each individually to make it opaque, and seal it inside a plain envelope. He would give Craig a pile of six or eight envelopes, and she would choose one at random, lie down on a couch, placing the envelope over her solar plexus. When she got what she felt was a convincing image, she would draw it. In this way she would work through the whole pile, and later on the two of them would compare the originals with the telepathically received images. The results of the experiments are fairly impressive: out of 290 drawings, she had 65 complete successes, 155 partial successes and 70 failures (Ibid., 14). She had some degree of success, therefore, in seventy-six percent of the trials.

          Much of the book is taken up with discussing each pair of drawings, the original and Craig’s telepathic copy. Here are a few of the more interesting observations. Once Sinclair chose a page from the Sunday newspaper supplement as a target, wrapped and sealed it, and put it in the pile for Craig’s exercise. What she drew, however, corresponded to the picture on the backside of the newspaper page (Ibid., 73). This seems hardly a chance event, and one is left to wonder whether Sinclair had taken subliminal notice of the picture on the reverse, whether that second picture was dimly visible through the page while he contemplated the intended image. Alternately, it may be that Craig was clairvoyantly viewing the contents of the envelope directly rather than telepathically reading her husband’s mind.

          On another occasion. Sinclair drew an obelisk for the target, and Craig responded with three nearly parallel lines, meeting at the top, pretty similar to Sinclair’s obelisk; but then instead of drawing a base for the monument, she drew little circles at the bottom end of each of the three lines. Sinclair says, “Why should an obelisk go on a jag, and have little circles at its base? The answer seems to be: it inherited the curves from the previous [drawing of a] fish hook, and [picked up] the little circles from the next drawing” (Ibid., 92). This contagion from one trial to the next is precisely what Jung described in doing the Word Association Test some quarter century earlier. He noticed that when a complex was touched with one word, the emotional effects would carry over and influence the responses to one or several succeeding words. In this way, we see that telepathy is not a wholly new capacity. We use the same associations and limbic-system connections in telepathy as in other life tasks.

          Again, Sinclair gave his wife a set of eight drawings and went outside for a walk along the ocean where they lived in Long Beach, California, while she struggled to discern the contents of the sealed envelopes. This time she did not get a single drawing right. Instead of reproducing the drawings, she sketched the thoughts Sinclair was entertaining on his walk (Ibid., 100). Here, it seems that a spontaneous form of telepathy triumphed over the laboratory variety, and it is to be noted that the telepath cannot discern the difference any more than she can tell whether her image derives from telepathy or clairvoyance.

How to mind-read. In the beginning Craig thought she might succeed by tensing up and concentrating on her tightly closed eyes, as though to bore through the darkness to a vision. She got nothing but headaches and learned that she could not succeed unless she relaxed her eyes (Ibid., 140). When she did so, she learned that what appears is anything but dependable: “Imagination is a far more active function than the average person realizes. This conscious-subconscious mind is ‘a liar,’ a weaver of fictions. It is the dream-mind, and also it is the mind of memory-trains” (Ibid., 131). One thinks immediately of Taussig’s (1987) informant: “Yagé [ayahuasca] lies.”

          In the end, Craig learned she had to deal with this lying dream-mind because it was the only tool she had. What she discovered about it is very much what Jung discovered about active imagination and Husserl about the transcendental ego. She urges the reader not to try to will the image into appearing. Rather work on developing the field of consciousness within which it may appear. She calls the goal “undivided attention,” and the “trick” to managing it is: “Putting the attention on one object, or one uncomplicated thought, such as joy, or peace, and holding it there steadily. It isn’t thinking; it is the inhibition of thought, except for one thought, or one object in thought.”

          She urges the would-be mind-reader to learn to relax and simply observe what happens within the conscious field. Avoid falling asleep on the one side or being carried away by “a train of subconscious day-dreams” on the other. All the while, she learned to hold the envelope “easily without clutching it.” In that mentally alert and physically relaxed state, the mind-reader must “give the mental order to the unconscious mind to tell you what is on the paper.”

          Now she moves on to describe what will happen. Fragments of images will begin to appear faintly, and “notions” will occur to you about what the image might be. Take those notions seriously and make a mental note of them, but do not jump to conclusions. Make the mind blank again. Return to your uncomplicated single thought of joy or peace and give the order again to present the image. Repeat this process two or three times. If a single image persists, accept it and draw it (Ibid., 124-31).

Toward a mind-to-mind theory. A much more systematic approach to telepathy was taken in the second decade of the twentieth century in France by René Warcollier. Trained as a chemical engineer, Warcollier made a fortune early in his life by coming up with a procedure to manufacture artificial jewelry from the scales of fish. His livelihood taken care of, he began experimenting with telepathy in 1910, and by 1922 had set up “telepathic posts” in several European countries.[2] Warcollier himself uses the definition of telepathy that was coined in 1882 by SPR investigator, F. W. H. Myers. It is a transmission from one individual to another without the help of the senses of anything including emotions, ideas, mental images, sensations, or words (Warcollier, 1948/2001: 1).

          Warcollier takes the very sensible position that in telepathy one unconscious “meta-mind” is in communication with another. Because the essence of the process is unconscious, far more of such communication takes place than we know. He estimates, in fact, that probably no more than a quarter of this meta-communication actually enters consciousness. Telepathy is, therefore, not at all limited to humans, but is a primitive process — common, he thinks, especially with herd animals and insects.[3] Probably flocks of birds and schools of fish are also in constant communication at this very basic level. Because it is so primitive, emotion plays a larger role than generally thought, and in the transition from unconscious to conscious, the impulse takes the form of dream-images and may be distorted or turned into symbols.[4] Thus Warcollier’s views are closely harmonious with those of Sinclair’s wife and C. G. Jung.

          Warcollier gives us several observations that help identify the process. He notes that in spontaneous telepathy a “signal forces itself on the subject.” The spontaneous subject is surprised by a signal strong enough to break through the barrier of his ordinary consciousness. This is probably why the whole message comes through. The experimental subject, by contrast, does not just receive; she has to “reach out for the signal”; as a result her attention wavers toward and away from the target and is more likely to come up with disconnected elements of the image (Ibid., 16).

          He notes that it is not the details of the message but its deep significance at the level of “meta-mind” that has effect. He illustrates this principle with an example of a clairvoyante who was able correctly to answer questions put to her in languages she did not understand, giving her answers in French. On one occasion, a man tested her with a question formulated in Hebrew. She responded that she was unable to answer the question because the man who asked it did not understand what he had asked. The questioner admitted the truth: he had had the question written out for him phonetically by a Hebrew speaker, and he had learned to pronounce the syllables without understanding what they meant (Ibid., 50).

          Warcollier’s technique for receiving telepathic messages is virtually identical with that of Mrs. Sinclair. The “percipient” and the “agent” would agree in advance on a time for the experiment. At the appointed moment, the agent would spontaneously choose an image and draw it. Meanwhile, the percipient would focus his attention on the agent, “clear his mind of all thoughts, and note the mental images appearing in consciousness (Ibid., 2).

          Warcollier’s short book (less than 100 pages) is largely taken up with analyses of telepathic hits and misses, intelligently categorized according to type. For example, he speaks of a message sent and received as a “psychic molecule” that is made up of both intellectual and emotional components. The psychic molecules received, therefore, will interact with the expectations, conscious and unconscious, of the percipient’s own psyche. Needs and associations based in past experience will draw the psychic molecule into agreement with them. The point could not be made more clearly that the reception of telepathic information is subject to distortion by the percipient’s own complexes, by neural pathways long established in the percipient’s limbic system (Ibid., 29).

          The French investigator’s main area of interest is in the fragmentary nature of most of the percipients’ drawings. His observations are very suggestive for those who have familiarized themselves with recent studies in neuropsychology and ethology. He says the percipient responds “like a child,” because when the image appears “the first thing he observes is movement” (Ibid., 22). Not only like a child, we would say, but like a vertebrate. For evolution has established the most sensitive defense insuring our survival in the wild in the form of alertness to movement that might suggest either a lurking predator or a convenient meal. The same instincts are mobilized in telepathy as function in every other life situation.

          He speaks, too, of “the irrationally mechanical decomposition of the target [image] into elements,” which he says reveals the primitive nature of “the latent model in the unconscious” (Ibid., 10). For example, the percipient rarely sees closed, static structures like circles and squares but rather the disconnected angles and arcs that comprise them (Ibid., 3) or sometimes only the pattern of relations between the parts of the image, while leaving out the parts themselves (Ibid., 18).

          All of these observations suggest that several visual cortex areas of the percipient’s brain are at work in response to the “psychic molecule” received. The problem is that the “binding” action which organizes our sensory world into a unitary reality for us remains for some reason unengaged, so that all we are left with are the fragmentary elements of edges, angles and relationships. This suggests Warcollier’s first reason why experimental telepathy is inferior to the spontaneous variety, for spontaneous images are “bound” into emotional/sensory/intellectual wholes. Something alive and numinous in the agent comes through as a whole to the percipient. Telepathy is more likely — synchronicities are noticed — when archetypes are engaged.

Causal and Synchronistic Elements in Telepathy

          Warcollier’s astute phenomenology of experimental telepathy reveals that both causal and acausal elements are involved. The neurobiological processes that occur to bring angles, arcs and relational patterns to consciousness belong to the field of causality, where one entity (neuron, molecule) interacts physically with another at a discrete moment and location. The “meta-mind” of the percipient, however, is not in physical contact with or within sensory range of the agent’s meta-mind. This is where the synchronistic field, characterized by non-locality and acausality, plays a role. In this section, we will consider the physiological mechanisms that bring messages up from the deeply unconscious psychoid functioning of the human organism to the point that we can become conscious of the message content. The mammalian organism is designed for communication — for sending, receiving, and interpreting information from relatives, from species members and even from members of other species. And the capacity for deep communication increases and becomes more differentiated among more recently evolved mammals, particularly among primates.

The role of ASCs. All of the experimental telepaths describe cultivating a non-ordinary state of consciousness similar to what is familiar to us from Jung’s active imagination and Husserl’s transcendental ego. More spectacular experiences of telepathy occur when the conscious state is further removed from the range of our everyday awareness. Thus Benny Shanon, the Israeli cognitive psychologist, reports that “practically everybody” who has had some minimal exposure to ayahuasca reports having had telepathic experiences: some involuntary, and others deliberately sent or received. Furthermore, ayahuasqueros are familiar with direct insight into the personality of others, of having “special access to their mental states and inner feelings” (Shanon, 2002: 256f). For example, he reports an incident in which he and several others “saw” a woman lose her soul:

Yes, I saw it. And apparently other people saw this as well. The dancing and chanting stopped. Assisted by another woman, the madrinha held the troubled woman. They sustained her, and at the same time sang. Over a period that I would estimate to be about twenty minutes, the woman’s soul came back and was lost again. Eventually, the woman regained her soul and her normal self. She then appeared tranquil, clean and visibly younger than she had looked before the session started (Ibid., 71).

          How they saw and knew so much, as we shall see, no doubt had much to do with perfectly explicable causal processes belonging to the physiology of the human organism. But these things almost never come so vividly to consciousness without the help of an alteration in brain state. We have to get out of our left-brain rational habits, at least; and very likely we have to induce a unitary brain state of a shamanic sort before such visions become common.

          Telepathy of every variety involves some degree of empathy, of “feeling-in” to the mental state of another, whether voluntarily or not. Walter Freeman, who describes the brain states that arise as AM waves fall into their basins of attraction, says that empathy is only possible when we leave the everyday mode of brain-function that supports learning. “You have to learn to understand and unlearn to empathize” (Freeman, 2000: 154). “Unlearning” is brought about by the release of neuromodulators in the brain, resulting in a loosening of “the synaptic fabric of the neuropil,” thereby loosing old beliefs and making it possible for new ones to be adopted. The neuromodulators account for the sense of numinosity that accompanies religious and political conversions, as well as falling in love (Ibid., 151). Such events occur every night during sleep and have to do with the influence dreams may have on our conscious attitude (Ibid., 153).

It seems to me that humans discovered how to control unlearning through trance states, using techniques of behavioral modification for [interpersonal] bonding far beyond the range of the nuclear family and the tribe. These practices have been elaborated through cultural evolution and are pervasive in modern society, although their social significance goes largely unnoticed and their neurochemical bases are largely undocumented (Ibid., 153).

Thus the “dysregulation” of the condition we think of as “ordinary consciousness” is essential if we humans are to communicate deeply with one another, form attachments, and communicate the most important things.

Mirror neurons. A good deal of excitement has attended the discovery by Giacomo Rizzolatti of the University of Parma and Michael Arbib of the University of Southern California that there is a small batch of neurons located in pre-motor tissue in the region where Broca’s speech-motor area is located in humans (Mithen, 2006: 130f). They have been called “mirror neurons” because they respond to the sight of a species member performing an action, and their firing results in the activation in the observer of the same brain areas that are involved in carrying out the observed action. They link Broca’s area solidly to communication and motor activation, again reminding us that speech in humans is an adaptation of the communication behaviors of lower primates. Mirror neurons assist in discerning the intentions of the other through observing how she behaves (Science News 167 (4/30/05): 278). They are responsible for visual-motor coordination (Allman, 2000: 152), but most importantly for understanding (Calvin, 2004: 73).

          Although we have not used the expression “mirror neurons” earlier in this book, the idea behind them has been fundamental to the top-to-bottom structure of the archetype. At the “top” of the structure, the animal recognizes a species pattern or a trigger for that pattern or perhaps just imagines or dreams that pattern. Such recognitions and projections, however, never take place in isolation; they involve cortical networks, limbic associations, typical forms of autonomic nervous system balance, altered hormone levels, and more. Years before the discovery of mirror neurons, philosopher Harvey B. Sarles discussed the report that the pulse rate of a person who has just been jogging will be “pulled down” through eye contact made with a non-jogger. “This suggests that interaction involves shared rhythms, that heart/pulse rates are susceptible of being shared, and that eye contact is sufficient to set up shared rhythmicity” (Sarles, 1985: 234).

          Douglas T. Kenrick of Arizona State University refers to the same dynamic, employing the expression “inherited decision biases.” He calls them, “cold, hard economic rules designed to serve selfish genetic interests. Yet they are accompanied by affective states that may be warm and fuzzy or even hot and steamy.” They facilitate coalition formation, status, self-protection, winning mates, retaining mates, familial care, and more. Dynamic interaction between conspecifics inevitably activates these decision biases and produces “reliable social dynamics.” Because such communications produce changes in autonomic nervous system balance, hormones must be involved (Kenrick, 2006: 21-6).

Limbic communication. In the West we tend to undervalue such things and need our laboratories to discover them because we rely so heavily in everyday life on the left hemisphere, which “appears to be inept at reading non-verbal social or emotional cues from others” (Siegel, 1999: 185). Here is one of the most glaring examples of how we can overrule an evolutionary asset that is fundamental to all birds and mammals, the limbic system — despite the fact that each of us has been almost completely dependent on it during infancy and that we use it constantly as adults, albeit unconsciously.

          The limbic brain is not limited to the complex reactions we discussed in Chapter 7. It gathers emotional significance from the facial expression, pupil size, body posture, gait and scent of another and determines immediately whether the other individual is careless, aggressive, friendly, sexual, submissive, and so forth (Lewis, et al., 2000: 53). Infants scan their mother’s face to determine the emotional significance of a situation by discerning what is on mother’s mind. Is this unfamiliar situation safe or dangerous? Through the limbic system, mothers and babies share an in-born common language in the form of real-time feedback. Watching a mere videotape of mother’s face will soon provoke distress in an infant because the signals she is giving have no connection with the baby’s present situation (Ibid., 61f). Similarly, experiments show that if one monkey hears a tone signaling that a shock is coming, his facial expression is enough to prompt a second monkey to press a lever to prevent the shock (Goleman, 1995: 103).

          The limbic system is essential to all social consciousness. Because it receives whole messages, wordlessly and without effort, it stands as the best candidate to play the role of Warcollier’s meta-mind. It must be the essential piece in the sending and receiving of telepathic messages. It creates emotional resonance between individuals, whereby we become attuned to one another’s internal states (Ibid., 86). For infants this means that they are regulated by their parents’ demeanor and behavior; but we adults, too, stabilize one another by alternately aligning ourselves and breaking away to re-establish our autonomy (Siegel, 1999: 71). All of our social life is a dance of emotional connections, where limbic states “leap between minds [and] feelings are contagious” (Lewis, et al., 2000: 64). We lure one another into our own emotional space, revising one another by emotional entrainment, not unlike the way that laughter and yawning are contagious.

          Once we are drawn into the emotional space of another, our own top-to-bottom archetypal structures become activated, hormones dispatched, memories and images evoked, inherited decision biases tapped. This is the causal, body-centered chain of events that is opened up by communication between limbic systems, and it is the organic computer that deciphers the information coming from another’s meta-mind. It is the explanation for the idiosyncratic failures of telepathic messages received under experimental conditions — the fact that images degenerate into angles and arcs as the percipient’s cortex struggles to reconstruct the source of a limbic impulse.

          It is also the explanation for why spontaneous telepathic experiences can be so vividly accurate. When Jung awoke in his hotel room feeling his patient’s despair, it was a limbic resonance he knew very well, for he had sat with that man over the course of many hours, cultivating an empathic connection. When he felt the shadow of a bullet pass through his skull, the patient’s vivid obsession coincided with a strong, sharp sensation, the culmination of that suicidal limbic state of mind. Nothing is more numinous than matters of life and death. The causal sequence in the telepathic reception is easily explicable. All we can say about the synchronistic dimension of that moment is that these things really do happen. It really looks as though the psyche is non-local in its functioning.

Remote Viewing: Scientific Pretensions

          In the 1970’s under the influence of the Cold War and publicity gained by a popular book entitled Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (Ostrander & Schroeder, 1970), the CIA and other government agencies put some effort into researching opportunities ESP might provide in their standoff with the Soviet Union. Their primary interest was clairvoyance and the possibility of spying on the enemy without having to be physically present. But being leery of the less than respectable reputation of the term, clairvoyance, they preferred to describe their activities as “remote viewing,” sometimes further dignified as “scientific remote viewing,” abbreviated RV and SRV. In general, they did not distinguish between clairvoyance (psyche’s contact with physical facts) and telepathy (psyche’s contact with psychic facts in the mind of a second person). In this section, we are concerned with the methods and refinements these scientifically inclined researchers developed.

          The Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Ft. Meade, Maryland, explored the capabilities of some individuals known for their psychic skills. Mel Riley, a staff sergeant who had been a photo interpreter for INSCOM and was known to have a sixth sense, employed a series of visualization techniques for reaching a reliably receptive state of mind. First, lying on his back and breathing slowly and steadily, he visualized his anxieties and distractions as a heap of clothing that he would gather piece by piece and by the armloads to stuff into an oversized suitcase, which he would then lock and place behind himself. Then he imagined donning scuba gear and diving into a limpid, tropical pool fifty feet deep. The goal was to hold himself motionless about ten feet off the bottom, where lying on the bottom represented falling asleep. In that deep and stable psychic space, he would accept a folder that symbolized the remote target he was to view in his imagination, but with the same critical intelligence he had been using with actual photos. He allowed the images from the destination symbolized by the folder to enter his consciousness in much the same manner as Jung, Husserl, and Craig Sinclair.

          Evidence for the sort of altered state Riley cultivated in this exercise may be gathered from his description of how he felt after finishing the remote viewing experiment: “When you get done, you have a tingling throughout your body. It’s like a high, only it’s a natural high” (Schnabel, 1997: 73). This is clear evidence of ANS tuning. The meditative quiet suggests elevated parasympathetic activity, while the tingling sensations imply elevation of the sympathetic system. Probably both were elevated at the same time, promoting a brain state characterized by some degree of integration. Riley added that after remote viewing, the sky was bluer, two birds on a wire sang like a rainforest full of toucans, Huxley’s “doors of perception” had opened wider, and he could feel the adrenaline pumping through his system (Ibid., 74f).

          One of the leaders of the team at Ft. Meade, Lt. “Skip” Atwater, had been able to travel out-of-body at will when he was a teenager (Ibid., 12). Another of the psychic stars there, Joe McMoneagle, had a knack for remotely viewed visions characterized by great realism, detail and narrative consistency. Some years earlier, he had suffered a near-death experience that taught him how to remain alert while descending into a dream-like state of consciousness (Ibid., 65ff).

          Out-of-body journeys and near-death experiences are similar in that one seems to have left one’s body behind and gained vivid, realistic imagery, as well as the numinous sense that one is encountering profound truths. Furthermore, their capacity to combine deep bodily relaxation with high emotional arousal, often terror, again implies elevation of both halves of the autonomic nervous system and therefore of integrated brain-states. The great master of out-of-body journeying, Robert A, Monroe, explains in his first book that the secret to generating the experience of “leaving the body” is to learn to remain aware and focused while the body falls asleep. Then one simply “rolls out of the body” while it lies insensible (Monroe, 1977).[5] Thus McMoneagle learned the same lession from his near-death experience that Monroe learned from his out-of-body journeys: how to combine deep relaxation with his alertness.

The Stanford Research Institute. While remote viewing at Ft. Meade on the East coast of the U.S. relied on individuals gifted at attaining unitive/transformative states of consciousness and who were aware of how they did so, another group of researchers on the West coast, at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), began working in 1972 on the hypothesis that every human being has the capacity for remote viewing (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: 69). Physicist Russell Targ and engineer Harold “Hal” Puthoff, who led the SRI team, both had belonged to Scientology briefly in the 1960’s and took seriously its belief that psychic abilities are natural to the human condition (Schnabel, 1997: 198ff). “Our laboratory experiments suggest to us that anyone who feels comfortable with the idea of having paranormal ability can have it” (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: 4).

          Despite the hypothesis, however, Targ and Puthoff managed to find some individuals with psychic gifts, and it is the results from these individuals that are the most discussed. Their first promising psychic was a New York artist named Ingo Swann. On his initial test, he was given the geographic coordinates of a target, and came up with a description that was “correct in every detail, even the relative distances on his map were to scale” (Ibid., 4). The real star of the SRI, however, was Pat Price, the president of a West Virginia coal company who had formerly been the police commissioner of Burbank, California. While Ingo Swann eventually developed a “method” to discipline his less spectacularly psychic gifts, Pat Price said he would “just decide” to view a remote target. He thought as long as he believed in himself he would succeed, there was nothing special to do (Ibid., 56).

          In his first test, Price was given the same target Swann was working on at the time, the Hoover Tower at Stanford University. Targ received in the mail from Price, who was still in West Virginia, a five-page commentary, starting from the correct altitude of the tower and ending with a tour of the building’s interior, including accurate descriptions of the equipment inside. He also listed the labels on a dozen file folders inside a locked cabinet (Ibid., 47f). When compared with the SRI’s less fabulously gifted psychics, Price’s results showed more detail and more “first place” matches. But he also had more clear misses and more erroneous interpretations of the data. In defense of the less gifted psychics, they worked harder and doubted themselves more, but they also failed less spectacularly when they failed.

          Standard procedure at SRI for testing and training psychics mixed clairvoyance with telepathy. Hal Puthoff would take ten sealed envelopes, numbered zero to nine, with him in his car and begin aimlessly driving around for a pre-arranged length of time. Meanwhile, Russell Targ was settling down with the psychic in a “viewing room.” At a specific time, Puthoff would generate a number between zero and nine on a random number generator and select the envelope with the corresponding number, open it and find inside the day’s target destination. Then he would drive to that location and gaze upon the site for fifteen or twenty minutes. Back in the viewing room, Targ would alert the would-be psychic to the time-frame for receiving information about the site. The psychic would enter a receptive state and draw the impressions received with pencil and paper.

Favorable circumstances. Eventually, Targ and Puthoff arrived at a number of conclusions about how to achieve the best results. First, intelligent, agreeable people with whom heart-to-heart trust could be established made the best candidate psychics (Ibid., 70). Second, it was better not to impose a rigid experimental procedure on the subject but to allow her to do what she feels she is good at and to work in the way she feels most comfortable. Third, the candidate’s seriousness of purpose being essential, the more challenging the task she is given, the better her chance of success. Fourth, a second person who is ignorant of the target should stay with the candidate to provide a comfortable, relaxed, structured environment. Fifth, one of the most important details is that the candidate should be given feedback on the success of her work as soon as possible after the test — even including a trip to the target site (Ibid., 10f; Targ, 2004: 94). It is also important to have the psychic draw the images that arise during the procedure and to write down all impressions (Ibid., 43f). The common theme in all six of these conditions is finding and maintaining an upbeat and cooperative frame of mind.

          Exceptionally good results were most likely in spontaneous situations that were life-threatening and required strength and courage (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: 196). Possibly as an off-shoot of this principle, Targ and his physician daughter began practicing psychic diagnosis around the year 2000. Targ says it is much easier to get good results with this practice than when remotely viewing “an object in a box,” very likely because of the life-or-death meaningfulness and the human connection (Targ, 2004: 33).

          Certainly the emotional charge associated with a target makes a big difference in how easily and clearly it can be seen. On one occasion, Pat Price was given the coordinates for a vacation cabin, but what he drew and described was a National Security Administration facility located just over the hill from the cabin. When he learned about the nature of his “miss,” Prince explained, “The more you try to hide something, the more it shines like a beacon in psychic space” (Ibid., 36).

          Probably this secrecy factor lies behind the SRI’s greatest psychic triumph, Price’s 1973 drawing for a CIA spy project, to determine the nature of an unidentified research and development facility the Soviets ran in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. He drew a huge crane mounted on four sets of railroad trucks rolling on tracks that ran alongside buildings. Other aspects of the site were no less accurately described, including their function. Price’s results were verified years later by satellite photos (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: Preface).

          Back at Ft. Meade on the East coast, Joe McMoneagle had similar success with a set of classified U.S. military secrets. Given a sealed envelope containing a black-and-white photo of an aircraft hanger at an undisclosed location, Joe did not draw the hanger, but the experimental tank it contained, a weapon whose existence had been a secret to McMoneagle. He produced an engineering-style drawing with cut-away views of the tank’s laser targeting system, its ammunition storage and feeder, main gun assembly, special high-tech armor, and more (Schnabel, 1997: 51).

Separating signal from noise. Unfortunately for the less gifted psychics, every task was not emotionally charged, a matter of life-or-death, or concerned with a closely guarded secret. To get accurate everyday readings out of a modestly gifted psychic like himself, Ingo Swann was convinced there had to be ways of refining his psychic techniques. His first proposal was to eliminate geographic coordinates from the assigned targets because they provoked too much involuntary, left-brain speculation. The coordinates 30N/90W, for instance, suggest immediately the environs of New Orleans; a fact that could well turn out to be an insurmountable distraction from the psychic task, which might have been targeted on a ship in the harbor or a drilling platform in the Gulf. Targ and Puthoff agreed to assign random four-digit numbers instead of coordinates.

          Eventually Swann began to think of remote viewing as a matter of separating signal from noise. The “signal” would be the images and impression actually received synchronistically (via clairvoyance or telepathy). He had no doubt that there always was a signal. The problem was caused by his memory, his day-dreaming imagination, and his compulsion to analyze and draw premature conclusions. All this semi-conscious, quasi-logical, left-brain activity that belongs to ordinary consciousness amounted to “mental noise,” and it constantly threatened to “overlay” and even drown out the signal (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: 37-42).

          As he attended to the changes in his consciousness during a session of remote viewing, Swann was able to distinguish four typical phases. First came kinesthetic sensations and fragmentary images that could be sketched. Then he would become aware of emotional and aesthetic responses to the target, such as fear, loneliness, or beauty. In a third stage, the psychic becomes aware of the physical dimensions of the target, whether it is heavy, tall, or wide. Often a strong urge to sketch is felt and should be indulged. But at this point one is also strongly tempted to jump to conclusions. This is where ordinary memories and day-dreams threaten to drown out the signal with their noise, what Swann calls “analytic overlay.” The psychic may make a brief note of them, but they should be placed in their own sector of the note page and labeled as “Aol” (analytic overlay). Once the impressions from all three phases have been collected, the psychic should write out a detailed report on the target’s appearance and function or purpose (Targ, 2004: 55).

          Social scientist Courtney Brown, who is Director of the Farsight Institute in Atlanta, has refined Swann’s ideas into a “matrix” or spread-sheet format that amounts to a device for very subtly manipulating what the Biogenetic Structuralists call the “warps” in consciousness (Brown, 1999). In this method, the novice psychic works with a guide who does the left-brain thinking and manipulations of the warps — very much as the master shaman guides the novice.

          The spread-sheet maps the psychic space of remote viewing. Columns are labeled across the top of the page, each standing for a different characteristic of the target and the effect it may have on the psychic. The categories might be (in my translations of the jargon): kinesthetic sensations felt by the viewer, general impressions of the magnitude and layout of the target, feelings aroused in the viewer, emotions picked up from people who might be in the region of the target, physical objects detected at the target, the feeling atmosphere of the target (dangerous, peaceful, etc.), conclusions about the target provoked by the guide’s questions, conclusions drawn by the viewer about the nature and function of the target. Each of Swann’s four stages of the remote-viewing session is represented by a horizontal row on the spread-sheet. Consequently, each square on the page has a distinct meaning. The guide directs the psychic to touch a square with the pencil point and wordlessly attend to the images, sensations, and feelings that correspond to that square on the matrix, and finally to make a note of them in the square. Finishing this sub-task leaves an empty warp in the psychic’s consciousness, and the guide immediately introduces a new suggestion by directing the psychic to touch a different square with the pencil.

          Clearly what Swann and others have done amounts to a very subtle refinement of a practice closely resembling Jung’s active imagination. By carefully separating aspects of the remote viewing experience into internal sensations, kinesthetic sensations, feelings, emotions, intuitions, and thoughts, and by attending to each category individually, they learned to derive a great deal of information from what might first seem to be poor and indistinct impressions. They have devoted particular attention to managing the transcendental ego, the non-ordinary psychic space that is free of incessant chatter and our usual tendency to reduce everything that is new to old familiar assumptions. They develop a sense based in the quality of their consciousness for what is “signal” and what is “noise.”

Cosmic visions. While Ingo Swann and his followers are rightly concerned with the noise of the limiting habits in our ordinary consciousness, Courtney Brown reveals a different sort of remote viewing error. Brown claims that anyone of average intelligence can be trained to do what he calls Scientific Remote Viewing, and that it does not involve altered states of consciousness (Brown, 1999: 19). At the same time, however, he describes what he calls a “deeply settled mind” that appears to resemble very closely the transcendental ego we have been concerned with — certainly not an ordinary sort of consciousness. When we are in this deeply settled state, he says, our consciousness is open to receive information from “subspace mind,” an expression that seems to refer to what Warcollier called “meta-mind” (Ibid., 9f). It appears, therefore, that everyone agrees on the phenomenology of the process.

          However, when Brown begins to describe how his method is practiced, we find two consciousness-changing preliminaries. First, one performs a brief bodily message on oneself, beginning with the hands and arms up to the head, and then with the feet and legs up to the heart. This is followed by breathing exercises: ten seconds of “fast pranayama” and ten minutes of “slow pranayama.”[6] This is then followed by the recitation of an “affirmation” of about 120 words in which one declares oneself a spiritual being capable of remote viewing and promising to use it only for the “growth” of oneself and others (Ibid., 30-33). Clearly, then, Brown works more aggressively at changing his consciousness than any of the others we have considered, including Mel Riley, with his three-stage visualization technique.

          Probably the most telling of his preparations for remote viewing is his dedication to the well-being of humanity, for this has taken him beyond the confines of Earth in his explorations. Forty years ago, Monroe also journeyed about in the solar system, out of curiosity to see the far side of the Moon and the surface of Mars. Later he discovered spiritual beings inhabiting a space he called Locale II, a non-material dimension of reality (Monroe, 1977, 1985). Brown has been finding aliens living in caves beneath the surface of Mars, also an expeditionary force of Martians in caverns in New Mexico. His books are warnings to all Earthlings that we are caught in the middle of an intergalactic battle between two groups of aliens: Reptilians who want to interbreed with us and take over our planet by sowing tribal warfare, and the Galactic Federation which wants to promote peace on Earth and subtly to assist us in realizing our spiritual potential as humans.

          Improbable as they may seem, it is not possible to disprove Brown’s claims. But it does seem likely that Reptilians and the Galactic Federation are mythic realities, that Brown is not exploring the Milky Way but the collective unconscious. No doubt we Earthlings are faced with an up-coming battle between the forces of acquisitiveness and tribal warfare on the one side and peaceful, spiritual aspirations on the other. Recent current events render such a prediction less than surprising. Given the dangers we face in global warming, the end of petroleum, the scarcity of fresh water, and our propensity to go to war over differences in ethnicity and religion, it does look as though we do not have much time to settle on the right approach.

          These issues are mythic. They have to do with the myth we are unconsciously living right now and the one we may be conscious enough to choose to live in the near future. Discovering the myth we are already living without knowing it was Jung’s original motive for exploring active imagination in 1913, when his dispute with Freud and his “creative illness” forced him to get to know his own myth. It looks as though Brown is on the same track but does not know it. He seems not to know that he is describing a myth for us all, and not literal outer-space armies.

          Here, then, is the second way that remote viewing can go off course. Brown has not lost his way due to the noise of ordinary consciousness drowning out the signal of synchronistic receptivity. Rather, he has found his way to a deeper reality, one that is not “remote” in a physical sense. It is remote in a psychological sense. In all probability, Brown has not been listening in to literal intergalactic councils; he has been watching the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness as they are arraying themselves behind the scenes in our present world-wide condition of crisis and confusion.

Psychokinesis

          The fact that Alexis Didier can describe the painting hanging in a stranger’s living room or that Joe McMoneagle can produce an engineer’s drawing of a prototype tank he had not known existed insult our habitual certainties. Instances of remote viewing are hard enough to grasp, but psychokinesis (PK) presents us with an even greater challenge. Uri Geller’s bent spoons, Victorian tables leaping and humming: these are the things that make us almost ashamed not to side with the skeptics. What happened when that rose chafer tapped on the window of Jung’s office? Had the patient’s “psyche cast a spell on it”?[7] It is harder to think that the rose chafer “bewitched her psyche,” for that would have required the beetle to have played a role in initiating the dream of the golden scarab that the patient had had the night before. Jung advises us not to worry about causes. There are none we can demonstrate or believe in. It is simply an acausal but meaningful coincidence.

          Yet psychokinesis happens, and there seems to be some invisible cause. Between 1850 and 1930 quite a few “physical mediums” plied a trade that seemed to make violins float about the room and play themselves and disembodied hands and arms materialize. Psyche was involved in these goings-on, but not necessarily “will.” Philosopher Stephen Braude’s survey of the field reveals that the agent’s intention was only doubtfully related to PK events. Most poltergeist cases seem to have involved only random “flailings” by objects in the psychic’s vicinity. Although mediums usually had some sense for when they were in the right state of consciousness to expect something, they often “had no idea, conscious or unconscious, of what phenomena were to occur.” Still, undoubtedly “in some cases the ostensible agent seemed either to know which phenomena were to occur, or at least consciously intended certain phenomena to occur” (Braude, 1986: 228).

          When anthropologist Edith Turner saw a “spirit tooth” leave the back of an afflicted Ndembu woman, in the form of “a large gray blob about six inches across, opaque and something between solid and smoke” (Turner, 1998: 83), the phenomenon had been intended. Singleton, the shaman, had been pressing on the woman’s back with his thumbs, and Turner had intended it, too, right along with the entire community. At the climax of the ceremony, she had suddenly felt powerless to help and then, in her confusion, she “learned how to clap.” She immediately became one with the group. Remarkably, however, she had no sense of cause and effect:

The time sense was not that of cause and effect; these things come as wholes. Either I was in the group or I wasn’t. Such differences from Western ways of thinking are themselves interesting. I feel that my own experience of tension and its release was probably necessary for me to have partaken in the good outcome, just as Singleton and Fideli had previously come out with their “words” as well. How it was that the release happened to everyone simultaneously, including the patient, I do not know. That is how it was (Ibid., 85).

In the end, she makes a plea for us to give up our blind reliance on Western certainties: “It is time that we recognize the ability to experience different levels of reality as one of the normal human abilities and place it where it belongs, central to the study of ritual” (Ibid., 94).

Micro-PK. When the parade of great physical mediums ended around 1930, parapsychology began to create its own psychokinesis experiments in the laboratory. Rhine’s experiments with dice was one example, but the favorite type of experiment eventually centered on random number generators (RNG). Can the presence of a psychic maintaining a certain state of mind or intention bring about some non-random effect as an RNG machine spits out number after number? The effects can be very subtle, very small — more numbers between one and five, perhaps, than between six and ten, compared to what would be expected by chance. The tininess of the effects led to this sort of laboratory experiment being called “micro-PK.”

          Dean Radin reports that the reputation of micro-PK has greatly improved. In the 1950’s it was nearly universally agreed that any effects at all were plainly impossible. Today, by contrast, “virtually no serious criticisms remain for the best RNG experiments. Informed skeptics agree that something is going on” (Radin, 1997: 145). One of the reasons for this change has to do with the nature of random number generators. Positive results can be attained without having to cause a single event. One merely has to “influence the collective behavior of the entire system.” Unusual things can happen without violating the overall behavior of the system as a whole (Ibid., 139).

          In other words, micro-PK slips past the laws of physics without violating our Western sensitivities. In addition to that, some intriguing results have been obtained, suggesting that there may be lawful behavior at work. When more than one person is involved as agent in a micro-PK experiment, the results improve. On average, pairs of agents do better than single individuals. But when pairs are of the same sex, results decline, and when of opposite sex they double. Most impressively, bonded couples or close family members produce effects greater than four times that of individuals (Ibid., 143). One thinks of Edith Turner’s report about the cure being effected just at the moment the community came fully together, Rhine’s results suggesting that interest and emotion are crucial to positive results in any form of ESP, and Targ’s observation that the best candidate psychics are those who are upbeat and can establish a trusting relationship.

          All of these findings are intriguing with reference to Jung’s theory that a psychoid principle may act to influence processes in a sort of organismic fashion. For organisms exert a holistic influence over all of their components. Consider how the neuron governs its component molecules on the one hand, and is governed within its neural networks on the other. Micro-PK might easily be an instance of this sort of thing.

          The first test of his psychic abilities that Ingo Swann was subjected to at the Stanford Research Institute involved micro-PK. He was taken to Stanford’s Varian Physics Building, where a quark detector was operating in the basement. The detector consists of a small magnetic probe surrounded by several levels of shielding, including a superconducting shield. It had been operating smoothly without irregularities for about an hour before Swann arrived. Having been asked to try to influence the frequency of the detector’s oscillations, Swann, standing on the floor above, “focused his attention” on the magnetometer, and after five seconds the frequency doubled and remained at that speed for about thirty seconds. In a second test, he managed to hold the higher frequency for forty-five seconds. Swann described “focusing” as visualizing the inside of the apparatus. While he made a sketch of what he had visualized, more perturbations were recorded in the quark detector’s oscillations (Targ & Puthoff, 2005: 20-25).

          Targ offers four working hypotheses for these results. One that he leaves unexplained is “weak quantum effects.” The other three boil down to synchronicity. In one of them he names “goal-ordered synchronicity.” In another he speculates that the mind may “involve control over noise signals . . . [and] bring order out of chaos”; but this would seem to be what Jung calls the psychoid effect of the archetype. In the last hypothesis, Targ cites “interfering observer effects,” which looks very much like the quantum discovery that the observer affects what is observed — i.e., one of Jung’s starting points in coming up with the theory of synchronicity.

Bio-micro-PK. Holistic physician Larry Dossey mentions a number of intriguing experiments that really ought to be called bio-micro-PK. Dossey describes experiments done at McGill University by Bernard Grad in the 1960’s. Barley seeds were watered (a) in the ordinary way and (b) with water in a sealed bottle that had first been held by an interested human for thirty minutes. An upbeat man with a green thumb found that his seeds grew significantly faster than those of the control, but Grad’s expectations were surprised when a depressed woman’s bottle of water produced even better results than those of the man. It had been thought that her depression would dampen the positive effects of her holding the bottle, but it seems the experiment had altered the woman’s mood. She became intensely interested and began asking relevant questions (Dossey, 1999: 40-42).

          In other experiments, Grad found that the growth-retardant effects of watering plants with a saline solution would be diminished when the bottle of water was first held in the hands for thirty minutes. Also the growth of goiters in mice, produced by withholding iodine from their diet, was retarded when the box containing the mouse was held in a person’s hands. Controls were (a) mice in untouched boxes and (b) mice in boxes artificially warmed to the temperature of a human hand (Ibid., 42f). At the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Qigong masters concentrated on test-tubes in which a slowly moving chain of biochemical reactions was taking place. The reaction speed increased by an average of fifteen percent when the masters were focusing (Ibid., 52f).

          In all of these bio-micro-PK experiments, organism is very much at the center of the effects. The processes affected are self-evidently organismic — growing seeds, growing goiters and the processes of biochemical reactions The presumed source of the effects are also organismic — human bodies and the focus of human consciousness.

Macro-PK: The Challenge of Ectoplasm

          As intriguing as these data from micro-PK and bio-micro-PK may be with respect to the theory of a universal psychoid field, philosopher Stephen Braude brushes them impatiently aside: “No amount of fiddling with random event generators promises the insights that could be gleaned from a medium the caliber of [Daniel Dunglas] Home and [Eusapia] Palladino” (Braude, 1986: 65). Micro-PK is preferred in the laboratory because it is easy to do, demonstrates that these things do happen, and implies a theory whereby all sorts of mind-over-matter phenomena might be possible. But the slight, unthreatening magnitude of its effects renders it easy to dismiss. Furthermore, Braude points out, trying to understand the broad variety of PK phenomena by studying a single type, like RNG effects, resembles an effort to understand the nature of humor by restricting oneself to slapstick (Ibid., 224). We will follow Braude’s advice and consider PK phenomena documented to have occurred under the influence of four well-known physical mediums, beginning with Eusapia Palladino.

Ectoplasm. Many of the Victorian physical mediums were famous for their ability to produce a white or grayish fluidic substance, called ectoplasm, that usually was extruded in some way from the medium’s own body while she was in a trance state. It was sometimes said to have a distinctive odor and to take on definite forms. Because ectoplasm was believed susceptible to destruction by light, the possibility that ectoplasm might appear became a reason for making sure that Victorian séances took place in near darkness. Poor lighting conditions also became an opportunity for fraud, particularly as faux ectoplasm was easy to make with a mixture of soap, gelatin and egg white, or perhaps merely well-placed muslin (Guiley, 1999). Ectoplasm seems a most unlikely substance; and since it was often faked, many of the Victorian claims have produced unwarranted skepticism. It may therefore be useful to prepare for future objections by devoting a few words to the subject here.

          Ectoplasm may be a Victorian word, but the phenomenon of its appearance is not limited to the Victorian period or even to Europe. Edith Turner’s account of the shamanic extraction of a “spirit tooth” from the Ndembu woman comes to a climax with the extrusion from the patient’s back of “a large gray blob . . . somewhere between solid and smoke.” In the ayahuasca section of Chapter 11, we encountered an extraordinary sort of “phlegm” that the shaman can produce from his mouth and that contains the “darts” with which he can inflict disease on others or absorb another shaman’s darts while healing a patient. The case for the ayahuasquero’s phlegm as a variation on an ectoplasm “archetype” is strengthened by the fact that on the other side of the world, another pre-literate culture’s shamans produce a magic substance from their mouths. Explorer Ronald Rose reports Aboriginal stories about “clever men” who could produce a “magic cord” or “rope.” Rose likens it to ectoplasm and learned that the cord can sometimes leave the clever man’s mouth and crawl about on the ground like a snake — another parallel with Amazonian phlegm. Rose witnessed some demonstrations of magic cord extrusion but was himself never able to see more than a string of saliva, while the natives present became very excited and claimed to see it clearly (R. Rose, 1956: 102-13).

Learning how. It may be necessary for the witness also to be in an altered state of consciousness before being able to see ectoplasm. Surely that was the case with Edith Turner, who felt powerless and isolated one moment and then became part of the clapping community the next, just in time to see the ectoplasm extruded. Rose makes clear the excitement of the Aborigines who swore they saw the magic cord, and most of those who have witnessed the Amazonian phlegm were also partakers of the brew. Indeed, since such things are “impossible” for Western ordinary consciousness, it would seem that seeing ectoplasm would be proof that the state of one’s mind had changed.

          Possibly this is the sort of change in consciousness that Ingo Swann believes we can all attain, and it is something we can train ourselves to do. There is an incident in Swann’s life that suggest that this may be true. In 1992 he participated in an experiment with a one-legged man, named Casimir Bernard, who had a vivid sense of his phantom limb. If it were really there, Swann wanted to feel it, too. So they sat in chairs, face-to-face, a few feet apart. Swann was hooded so that he could derive no visual information. Bernard would lift his phantom leg or leave it bent with his phantom foot on the floor, while Swann’s job was to determine whether the leg were up or down. To ascertain whether it were up, Swann waved his arm through the space where he thought it should be. In his first 133 trials, Swann performed no better than chance at guessing whether the leg were raised. But then he suddenly said that he had learned what the phantom leg “felt like,” and from them on his performance at guessing the position of the leg greatly improved (Sheldrake, 2002: 147ff).

          What this exercise suggests is that just as one has to learn to use the transcendental ego with the right sort of subtlety if one is to become clairvoyant, so also one may have to learn about the subtleties of psychic materialization before these phenomena become dependably real.

Expert testimony. Charles Richet was one of the leaders of the “French School” of somnambulism studies, a very careful observer of psychics who often collaborated with the English SPR and shared their healthy skepticism. He has made a number of observations on ectoplasm that leave little doubt that he found some of the phenomena both not fraudulent and impossible to explain. Regarding the Belfast medium, Kathleen Goligher, for instance, he reported that ectoplasmic forms issued “usually from her navel or vagina and often raised upward like a cantilever to lift the table in front of her” (Braude, 1986: 155). A psycho-sexual energy like the Hindu kundalini may have been involved, since Richet’s vague reference to navel or vagina suggests the Svadhishthana chakra, which Jung associates with the opening of a world that is unthinkable from the everyday point of view (Sem32: 13-22) and may be familiar to many people as the location where danger and sexual challenge may be felt as a bodily disturbance.[8]

          Another medium, Eva C., produced ectoplasm that was even more astounding. Eva’s ectoplasm like that of the ayahuasqueros and clever men, emerged from her mouth. In her case it slowly descended to her knees, alternately spreading out and retracting, like a living, growing thing. Richet said it formed pseudopodia as though it were a giant amoeba, and sometimes the ends of the pseudopodia took on the form of fingers and then were reabsorbed. On one occasion he handled a “perfectly modeled hand . . . [that has] the feeling of a normal hand; I feel the bones and fingernails. Then it retreats, diminishes in size and disappears in the end of a cord” (Ibid., 154). The famous German student of the French School and parapsychologist, Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, said of the same medium that the flowing white substance that emerged from her mouth was about twenty inches long and eight inches wide (Ibid., 151).

          Most astounding is a plaster cast of ectoplasmic hands, with fingers folded in an interlocked position made by Gustav Geley in 1924. The medium’s pseudopodia had formed themselves not only into two well-formed hands, but interlaced the fingers as we might do with our fleshly hands while in the waiting room of the dentist’s office. The ectoplasmic hands had remained stable long enough for Geley to pour molten wax over them to make a mold. When the wax had hardened and the hands had dematerialized, he filled the wax mold with plaster. When the plaster dried, he melted the wax away, leaving behind a perfect plaster model of clasped hands. Because the fingers of the model were interlaced, there would be no way for fleshly hands to be extracted from the wax without destroying it. Dematerialization was the only way they could have escaped the wax.

          Engineer, philosopher, and parapsychologist Arthur M. Young recounts this story of the folded ectoplasmic hands to demonstrate our Western intransigence in the face of challenges to our metaphysical assumptions. He says:

All necessary precautions against fraud were taken, and some of Geley’s experiments were witnessed and testified to by a panel of thirty-four scientists and officials.

More empirical proof could hardly be imagined, yet this work has been totally ignored. Why? Because there is no theory to account for it, and existing theories apparently rule out its reality (A. Young, 1976: 134).

Eusapia Palladino

          Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918) is one of the most famous and notorious physical mediums. Volumes have been written about her, but we shall restrict ourselves to a few facts that give us a sense for what Braude calls the wide variety of PK phenomena. Born to a lower class family in Naples, Eusapia was found to be “vulgar, earthy, and addicted to bad company,” and there are hints that she stole valuables from people who sat in on her séances (Gauld, 1968: 224). Her psychic gifts were discovered in 1872, when she was eighteen, and having been orphaned, taken in as a servant by a wealthy family given to spiritualistic practices (Feilding, 1963: 22).

          She may have been the most extensively examined medium in Europe. Some of the high points include a first examination in Turin by Professor Cesare Lombroso, who declared in 1891 that she produced her phenomena without fraud. In 1892, she was examined in Milan, where a group of scientists generally agreed that her phenomena were genuine. One of them, Charles Richet, declared they had no indisputable proof for that claim. Pretty much the same conclusions were arrived at in Warsaw in 1893-94 by psychologist Julien Ochorowicz, who collaborated later with the English SRP, which also examined her in 1894 and 1895. The members were split on the question of fraud in some cases but convinced they had found it in others (Ibid., 22-5).

          Eusapia’s most dedicated examiner was Everard Feilding of the SPR. He was a non-practicing lawyer from a wealthy family. When he was twenty-eight, a sister died creating for him a crisis of faith and driving him to become an active member of the investigating core of the society, dedicated to finding evidence that the soul survives bodily death. Eleven years later, he lost a brother in a boating accident and became more persuasive than ever in the SPR for investigating psychokinesis. A visit to Eusapia in Naples convinced him that physical phenomena had occurred (Ibid., v-xx). E. J. Dingwall assembled and reprinted some of Feilding’s investigatory work in 1963, Sittings with Eusapia Palladino