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Terms of Parapsychology
The bulk of research that exists can be divided into three areas that invariably overlap, namely telepathy, perception at a distance, also known as clairvoyance and perception over time, also known as precognition.
Telepathy usually consists of cases where one mind communicates information to another, clairvoyance ('clear viewing') is about how the mind can gather information without using our ordinary senses and precognition ('advance knowledge') is about how consciousness gathers information that does not yet 'exist' in linear time. With ESP it is almost always impossible to deduce with any reliability which is which. For instance, a person describing the simultaneous activity of someone else's actions at some distant location (telepathy) might in actual fact be describing what he or she might learn in the future (precognition) about the persons actions at the time, as feedback is often supplied later on. Unconsciously experiencing memories of the future rather than the past, as it were. This may sound farfetched, but as we shall see, not only space but also time seems to have different properties in the strange but fascinating world of parapsychology.Fortunately for us it matters little how the different phenomena are to be categorised as all are, in one way or another, expressions of non-local consciousness. Non-local consciousness being the part of our mind that is not restricted to the here and now, but free to gather information from pretty much any point in time or space. As this will no doubt all be beginning to sound like an episode of "the twilight zone", we shall press on to examine a few specific methods used when researching non-local consciousness. Not that the sense of the twilight zone is likely to diminish, but at least there is some comfort to be found in scientific method. Especially when in a world appearing gradually more similar to the twilight zone.
Ganzfeld Telepathy Experiments
That sensory deprivation (i.e. reduced activity in our ordinary senses) can cause especially receptive mental states bordering on the 'mystical', is a commonly acknowledged fact today. For instance, sensory-isolation chambers in which a person is shielded from sound and vision and floating on saltwater of body temperature, can induce highly suggestive mental states. While in this state, it is possible to make hypnotic suggestions to the subject such as "your craving for nicotine is diminishing", which will have a far greater impact than spoken in any ordinary surroundings to an ordinary state of mind. Similar states can be reached through various methods of meditation, through certain drugs, in our dreaming state as well as prior to falling asleep and under hypnosis. Though in the above case the suggestion is delivered to the ordinary senses, it seems reasonable to assume that the mind should be exceptionally receptive to extra sensory information in this state.
It therefore seems logical that if one is to study telepathy, or any other aspect of non-local consciousness, these are the states of mind that will provide the greatest results. In the early seventies three researchers, parapsychologist Charles Honorton, and psychologists William Braud and Adrian Parker, independently came to the same conclusion. Each researcher decided to study the phenomenon of telepathy using a sensory deprivation technique called the 'ganzfeld', which is German and means "whole field". The basic idea, according to Dean Radin, was that if a person was placed in a condition of sensory deprivation, the nervous system would soon become "staved" for new stimuli, and the likelihood of perceiving faint perceptions that are normally overwhelmed by ordinary sensory input would improve.
The ganzfeld-telepathy experiments had several advantages over earlier experiments, and are particularly interesting in terms of providing reliable scientific evidence. It proved to be a very efficient way of studying the phenomena (as earlier efforts demanded more time and effort and were generally more difficult to interpret) and offers specific guidelines as to how experiments should be conducted and evaluated, allowing for that bastion of scientific faith: independent reproduction.
The ganzfeld method has three stages, preparation of receiver and sender, sending of target and evaluation of outcome. This provides a separation of sender, receiver and experimenter as well as an unambiguous way to measure the outcome.
In a typical session the receiver will be positioned in a secluded room in a reclining chair, wearing headphones and some opaque shielding over the eyes (such as table-tennis balls cut in half). The headphones will produce so called white noise (basically static, the kind you find between radio stations or on television channels after transmission has ceased) and a red light will be shone at the receivers' face. Eventually the brain becomes starved for new visual imagery or changing sound. At this point impressions may pop up in the mind, which the receiver is instructed to continuously report into a nearby microphone. In the mean time, the sender is in another location concentrating on the randomly selected target, or group of targets. These targets may be single images or sometimes video-clips, including movement and sound. The experimenter, however, is not aware of which target the sender had selected or been given, and is in fact as unaware (or as unaware as it is possible to be) of what is being telepathically transmitted as the receiver is. This protocol ensures a minimal risk of contamination due to experimenter influence.
In many cases the receiver communicates his or her impressions directly to the experimenter as well as the sender, though this is commonly a one way communication. This allows the receiver the comfort of knowing that someone is listening, as the sense of isolation might cause distress that is likely to reduce the outcome of the experiment. Also this allows for the reported impressions to be recorded and analysed later, as well as giving the sender feedback, which might in turn help the sender to improve the telepathic transmission of the target.
After the transmitting session is over, the receiver is shown a number of possible targets. The receiver is then asked to identify which target or targets he or she feels most closely corresponds to the impressions previously experienced. Usually, four possible targets are presented to the receiver, who ranks these 1 to 4, one being the most likely target. If the one is accredited to the correct target this is considered a 'hit', if any other number is, then it is a 'miss'. This means that the statistical rate of hits due to pure chance, over a number of experiments, should deviate only marginally from 25%.
So how successful were these experiments in proving telepathy (with the added facilitation of sensory deprivation)?In a meta-analysis from 1985 comparing the hit-rate of twenty-five different experiments totalling a 762 sessions, the overall hit-rate was 37%. This corresponds to odds against chance of a trillion to one. In 1997 another meta-analysis was undertaken, including all comparable ganzfeld experiments to date, totalling 2549 sessions from a number of different research facilities in both America and Europe. The overall hit-rate was lower, 33.2%, but taking the greater number of sessions into account the odds against chance were far greater: a million billion to one (100 000 000 000 000 to 1). In other words, telepathy, the transmission of information from one mind to another, has a substantial scientific validity.
The fact that we can reach out and 'touch minds' in some sense is no proof that consciousness survives beyond death, naturally, but it is interesting as it allows for knowledge to be transmitted through the power of mind alone. As our knowledge is undeniably a part of our identity or sense of self (consciousness without knowledge would undoubtedly be a rather limited affair), evidence of telepathy is of some importance. Also, telepathy represents a form of communication between minds, and communication is another important aspect or component of consciousness, as noted in chapter two. If minds can communicate knowledge to each other through the power of thought and intent alone, what else might they be capable of?
I Spy with My Minds Eye
Of all the experiments designed to explore non-local consciousness, the process known as remote viewing is probably the most interesting and the most demonstrative of what our mind is actually capable of sensing. Though this process leans partly on telepathy, the bulk of experiments have dealt with clairvoyance and precognition. The main reason that remote viewing is so successful may be that it was originally designed and developed not for scientific purposes but for more practical, even sinister, ones. Remote viewing was created in order to gather intelligence, or to use the more common term, to spy.
Before the cold war gradually warmed to a more agreeable temperature, it came to the attention of the CIA, among other agencies, that the then thriving Soviet Union made extensive use of 'psychics' in order to gather information. As the common practice in those days was "if they've got one we want one too", the various US government agencies initiated a program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) aimed at making use of psychic spies. This was done by enlisting among others the renowned psychic Ingo Swan and physicists Harold Puthoff and Russel Targ. In hindsight, this may prove to be one of the few truly beneficial endeavours springing from the cold war era, and there are several publications that deal with its history, its results and its implications.
Though the objective of a remote viewing session may vary, the basic method is the same. The 'remote viewer' is asked to sketch and/or describe the designated 'target'. This target may be a remote location (a common target in the above mentioned context, where the remote viewer would be offered only map co-ordinates), a person, an object, a photograph or something else of which the viewer has no direct or indirect knowledge of by any ordinary means. In most cases the remote viewer is accompanied by an interviewer who asks questions about the viewers impression of the target, and in these cases the interviewer is equally without knowledge of the targets actual nature. Basically, the viewer relaxes and describes whatever impressions come to his or her mind and these impressions are later, when this is possible, compared to the actual target.
Though the objective of a remote viewing session may vary, the basic method is the same. The 'remote viewer' is asked to sketch and/or describe the designated 'target'. This target may be a remote location (a common target in the above mentioned context, where the remote viewer would be offered only map co-ordinates), a person, an object, a photograph or something else of which the viewer has no direct or indirect knowledge of by any ordinary means. In most cases the remote viewer is accompanied by an interviewer who asks questions about the viewers impression of the target, and in these cases the interviewer is equally without knowledge of the targets actual nature. Basically, the viewer relaxes and describes whatever impressions come to his or her mind and these impressions are later, when this is possible, compared to the actual target.
Naturally, this does sound quite ludicrous as it offends every traditional scientific sensibility we have developed the last couple of hundred years, and would be quite laughable if it did not prove to be so astoundingly effective in many cases. The most talented remote viewers would repeatedly come up with surprisingly accurate descriptions of the targets in question, well beyond anything that could be attributed to chance. We shall look into a few such examples later on.
In most cases, however, the resulting descriptions of targets would be more symbolic than photographic in nature. For instance, remote viewers would quite often be successful in describing such aspects as shapes and structures as well as their relative size and locations, but the nature of these structures would seldom be apparent. Textures, temperatures, colours and other clues into the nature of the target, including sometimes its purpose or function, would often be provided by the viewer, as well as drawings that bore striking similarities to the target or target area, but the nature of the target itself would often remain obscure. Exceptions exist, naturally, as we shall see when we look into the results of some of the most talented remote viewers later, but "looking with ones mind" seems fundamentally different to using ones ordinary senses.
In the early cases, where remote viewing was undertaken on assignment for various government agencies, the results were forwarded to whatever agency that had requested the remote viewing as well as supplied the target, for further analysis. That these sessions were rarely perfectly accurate in their results should not dissuade anyone, as it is quite remarkable that they held any accuracy at all. It is truly mind boggling that a person provided only with co-ordinates on a piece of paper to a location where that person had never been (as most locations were highly classified), should be able to describe anything significantly relevant about the location at all. To add to the overall strangeness, sometimes these co-ordinates were presented in an envelope that was not even opened. Perhaps this does not strike the average government spy as exceptionally strange, but to most scientists it is nothing short of impossible. Yet, remote viewers managed to repeatedly describe these locations with such accuracy that the various agencies ordering these descriptions suspected breaches in security.
An even stranger aspect of remote viewing is the fact that distance in time seemed to present little more hindrance than distance in space. In several sessions the remote viewer was successful in 'seeing' both past and future events which were later verified. In some cases this verification had to wait several months, as the viewer reported on events a long way into the future (one highly significant such case is reported below). These systematic cases of precognition are as usual all but impossible to explain in terms of chance, presenting some serious practical and philosophical problems to deal with also. Though cause and effect are still to be reckoned with, prior knowledge of the future will invariably have an effect on said future, allowing cause and effect to interact in strange new ways.
The issues that precognition, or clairvoyance for that matter, raise for practically every scientific discipline need fortunately not concern us here. Yet the evidence of consciousness being able to 'stretch' both through space and time (i.e. non-locality) does warrant such questions as "does consciousness truly reside in the brain?", seeing as how consciousness can go pretty much everywhere. Again the evidence seems to imply that the brain is merely the focal point of a consciousness that does not adhere to space nor time in ways we have come to expect. But this is a discussion best saved for the end of this chapter. A few of the most telling sessions will be briefly recounted below, so the reader might better understand both the process of remote viewing, the significance of its results and above all, its implications for our consciousness and its interaction with the world as we presumed we knew it.