Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Ulics, Rozi,  "Members’ Forum: Parapsychology from the Therapist’s Couch" Quest 111:1, pg 9

By Rozi Ulics

Wir sterben viele Tode solange wir leben, der letzte ist nicht der bitterste.
We die many deaths throughout life, the last is not the most bitter.

—Karl Heinrich Waggerl

Many years ago, personal tragedy landed me on the therapist’s couch. My brother had passed away from a brain tumor, and I was struggling to cope. During one particularly intense therapy session, something unexpected happened. A large black bird launched itself from a strand of trees in the distance, soared across the parking lot, and alighted on the ledge outside the window. Fixing me in its gaze, it started to peck at the glass. And then kept pecking—for an uncomfortable length of time. We gaped, my therapist and I.  “How remarkable,” she said, more than a little unnerved. “What do you think your Theosophists would say about that!?”

At the time, I had just found the Theosophical Society, and as far as my therapist was concerned, the verdict was still out. It wasn’t the Society’s stance on the paranormal that concerned her, for she was very open-minded. It was more the potential for “cultish” influence that gave her pause—especially for a client already on shaky ground.

I myself wasn’t yet quite sure what “my Theosophists” would say about this black bird. I was still new to Theosophy. Was it an omen? A ghost? A warning? Nothing at all?

To me personally, it seemed like a message: “Come.” Perhaps like many of us, I have always found that the pull of the so-called “other side” has always been a bit stronger for me than life in this one. Even without the guarantee that there even was an “other side,” in my state, the current world seemed pretty meaningless. What was the point?

The powers of the mind, especially when paired with strong emotion, are extraordinary. These powers sometimes get unleashed when we are least in control. High fever, head injury, trauma can cause people to display extraordinary skills not present before. When these are entertaining skills. such as the power to suddenly compose full orchestral sonatas without ever having touched a musical instrument, society nods its head in indulgent approval. But when the power involves invoking the tap-tap-tapping of a raven on our chamber door, then it’s a different story. Superstition or dismissal creep in. Such things are most often explained away as random occurrence. But this is harmful. People who are already struggling become even more confused. Helpful messages are then rejected or misinterpreted. Arbitrary things “out there” happen to us, and the world becomes a very scary place. Who can be surprised when vulnerable people fall under the influence of bad actors then?

Theosophy tells us a different story. The universe is full of meaning. The unexplained powers of the mind are real. They can give us signs to follow to what is authentic in life. Rather than things “out there” happening to us, it is the other way around.  The things in the inner world, over which we can have full control if we know how, project out into our environment and draw experience to us. How we respond to these experiences is also in our control, although it takes hard work. And for some of us, professional help.

It seems my powers of the mind were posing a choice I couldn’t ignore, and thankfully my therapist didn’t dismiss. I could either invest in life and be useful, or go already. But I couldn’t stay where I was, feeling sorry for myself and lost.

I bless my therapist for turning me in that moment towards Theosophy. That we have a society where such things as parapsychology and other uncomfortable topics are not only openly explored but given a sensible, nondogmatic context, is remarkable! How lucky we are. What a force for good we can be in the modern world. People are starved for meaning. They are starved to know there is order and purpose in life—even in the events that have no explanation. Ultimately, they are starved to know that they are not alone in this world. If they are not alone, they don’t have to cling to one person or organization to feel safe. Because all of humanity is in this together. That’s the role of the Theosophical Society: to help offer meaning to those who feel meaningless. Because we are all Theosophists in the end. Some of us just need an unnerving tap to know it.

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Rozi Ulics is past president of the D.C. National Capital Lodge of the TSA, and has served on the board of directors of the Mid-South Federation and Theosophical Order of Service. She currently serves as Eastern district director on the board of the Theosophical Society in America.

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Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary,  "Abraham Maslow: Getting Back to Human Nature" Quest 111:1, pg 36-40

By Gary Lachman

Sometime in the 1940s, the behavioral psychologist Abraham Maslow had what then seemed a radically new idea. He decided to study healthy people rather than sick ones. Maslow had trained in the Freudian tradition, as most American psychologists had, and he had cut his experimental teeth following the laboratory rigors of behaviorism, the then-dominant school of psychology.

Freud’s ideas about the Oedipal complex, repression, defense mechanisms, the death wish, and the other notions making up the formidable array of psychoanalytic tools portrayed the modern psyche as invariably neurotic. Freud had argued this point cogently in his late work, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), in which he says that because the demands of civilization necessarily lead to the inhibition of our basic drives (for Freud, this meant sex), we all suffer from unavoidable frustration. In order to enjoy the benefits of civilized life and the security it brings, we must delay the gratification of our desires or even go without it at times. This inevitably leads to a conflict between the id—Freud’s term for the unconscious—and the superego, the inner disciplinarian who chastises us for having such beastly appetites in the first place. We will never be free of this psychological friction, Freud believed, but we could become “better adjusted” to the demands society makes on us. Such a “well-adjusted” individual became the goal of psychoanalysis.

J.B. Watson’s behaviorism did not deal with the unconscious; in fact, it jettisoned the idea of any inner world entirely and focused on what factors influenced human behavior, which, after all, is all that we can observe. Watson was a proponent of the “blank slate” or tabula rasa school of psychology, which has its roots in the philosophy of John Locke. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Locke argued that there was nothing in the mind that didn’t get there by way of the senses. Contrary to Plato, Descartes, and, later, Kant and psychologists like C.G. Jung, who in different ways argued that we do not come into the world completely unfurnished, Locke contended that there was nothing innate in the mind; it was at birth empty. (This, by the way, is behind Locke’s notion that “all men are created equal”: we all start equally blank.)

Watson took this insight and ran with it, famously declaring that given enough time and the proper environment in which to work on them—a key ingredient in behaviorism—he could, on demand, transform any child into a doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, or anything else.

Although Watson’s optimism is not as evident among behaviorists today, the idea that the environment—nurture—is all-important remains, while any notion of an intrinsic human nature is strictly verboten. The human psyche is infinitely plastic, completely malleable. In order to create a just society, we should, as B.F. Skinner, a later behaviorist, declared, abandon any notions of freedom and dignity and submit to the conditioning needed to bring such a society about.

Yet when Maslow turned his attention to studying “the best specimens of mankind I could find”—among them his colleagues the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology—he discovered that both Freud and Watson were wrong. People in the modern world were not invariably neurotic; indeed there were quite a few for whom being “well-adjusted” meant nothing—would, in fact, mean an actual lowering of their psychological stature in order to fit in. And contrary to the still reigning dogma that nurture, or culture, always and everywhere trumps nature, there was a recognizable transcultural human nature, and it had little to do with the pessimistic conclusions of Freud.

Maslow found that we seem to have a natural, that is instinctual, appetite for the higher values that both Freud and behaviorism sought to reduce to something lower. We were not stimulus-response machines, driven solely by antecedent forces, nor were idealism, altruism, spirituality, and mystical experiences simply the product of sublimated lower drives. They were a real part of human psychology and human biology and were just as innate as hunger, thirst, and the need to breathe. This was radical indeed.

As his biographer and friend Colin Wilson pointed out, Maslow was at best a “reluctant rebel,” who, initially at least, saw his work as adding to and expanding the field of behavioral science, not undermining it. Throughout his career he retained a respect for Freud and for the rigor of the behaviorists, even when it was quite evident that both had, in his words, sold human nature short.

By now, Maslow’s ideas about “self-actualization,” the “hierarchy of needs,” and “peak experiences” are part of the schools of humanistic and transpersonal psychology that he helped found in the 1950s and ’60s, and have even entered into the general language. Yet Maslow never felt truly at home within what was becoming known as the “alternative society.” After an unpleasant experience at the hands (literally) of the touchy-feely Gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls, Maslow chided Michael Murphy and others at California’s Esalen Institute—where the unpleasantness took place—for their anti-intellectualism and penchant for ersatz spontaneity, their preference for the sensuous hot tub over the cerebral think tank.

Maslow’s road to becoming an “uneasy hero of the counterculture,” as another biographer, Edward Hoffman, called him, was anything but straightforward and obvious. There were no dramatic episodes, like the oft-told story of Jung’s break with Freud, or sudden overnight successes. Maslow steadily worked his way against the current of mainstream academic psychology, slogging through often boring teaching and research positions at a number of institutions for decades. His last year (he died of a heart attack in 1970) was spent outside the academy, as a consultant for the Saga Food Corporation, who saw in his ideas about the possibility of a creative relationship between employer and employee an answer to the problems of productivity and motivation. (Unlike his friend the Freudian Marxist Erich Fromm, Maslow believed such a rapprochement was highly possible.) Motivation—what encourages someone to put their best into their work, whatever it may be—was a subject that remained at the heart of Maslow’s own.

Abraham Maslow was born on April 1, 1908, the first of seven children of a Russian-Jewish immigrant from Kyiv. His father was a cooper, a barrel maker, and his life exemplifies the American success story familiar to earlier generations. Through hard work, thrift, and determination, Samuel Maslow lifted himself and his family out of a slum district in Brooklyn and into increasingly well-off middle-class neighbourhoods. Yet the pressure to succeed meant Maslow saw little of his father.

This was not the case with his mother, with whom Maslow had at best a disastrous relationship. He called her a “horrible creature” and throughout his life had little good to say about her. Once he left home, they saw little of each other, and he did not attend her funeral. Her superstitious character put him off religion for life; although in later years he came to understand its positive side, throughout most of his life Maslow was a secular atheist.

More earthly reasons were also key to this dysfunctional relationship. Stinginess led his mother to lock the refrigerator door so that Maslow often had to beg her for food. When she noticed Maslow’s growing love of music, she smashed a collection of 78 LPs he had bought. When Maslow found an abandoned kitten and brought it back home, his mother told him to get rid of it. When he didn’t, she killed it in front of him. No doubt this incident prevented Maslow from performing a similar act: he was unable to meet the challenge of killing a cat required to join a local gang. Maslow’s fondness for animals extended to the monkeys he would later study, many of whom he found more congenial company than his colleagues.

Maslow wondered why, with such a schizophrenogenic mother (one who drives her children crazy), he didn’t turn out worse than he did. He attributed his comparative sanity to the care and attention he received from an uncle, the first of several father figures he would later encounter in academia.

Along with an unloving mother, Maslow also had to contend with the anti-Semitism that was endemic to society. He dealt with anti-Jewish sentiment throughout most of his career, even in the hallowed halls of academe, if not especially there. Never a religious observer, Maslow nevertheless later came to believe that the high moral and ethical code, hunger for a just society, strong community sense, and altruistic aims of the Jewish faith expressed the idealism and world-bettering instinct he found in the people he came to call “self-actualizers”: individuals who strive to realize their highest ideals and potentials.

Yet this hunger and thirst for righteousness came at a price. The late cultural mandarin George Steiner, himself a Jew, once remarked that Jews have been disliked because they set too high a moral standard, one most people cannot meet. In his last days Maslow came to feel that his self-actualizers were often subject to a similar resentment from those quite happy to meet the minimum requirements for being human, but not more. Later he would christen this avoidance of the demands of what is best in us the “Jonah complex,” after the biblical character who runs away from his higher calling. If you deliberately did this, he warned, you will be “deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.” Why? Because “you will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”

Maslow’s own life, from his early start at Brooklyn College to his last years at Brandeis University, are testament to the effort, courage, and determination living up to our higher potentials often entails.

When Maslow turned his attention to studying healthy people—a career decision his colleagues at Columbia University thought aberrant—he had already come to the belief that “human nature is not infinitely malleable.” Working with the great American psychologist E.L. Thorndike, Maslow decided that it was pointless trying to separate the hereditary from the environmental in the psyche, as Thorndike hoped to: the two were impossible to pry apart. Maslow did see, though, that as humans, we have a nature that resists influence from outside and that attempts to impose arbitrary conditioning on our fundamental being did damage to ourselves.

Much as Jung would speak of the archetypes, Maslow saw that we come into the world with a set of needs already in place, the satisfaction of which proceeds in a kind of sequential order and constitutes psychological, and often physical, health. The environment we find ourselves in may, of course, frustrate the gratification of these needs; hence Maslow’s interest in creating communities dedicated to fulfilling these inherent needs and nurturing our potential (an expression of his constitutional utopianism). Nonetheless, these needs are there, and Maslow observed that his self-actualizers often had to struggle against difficult conditions, as he had, in order to actualize themselves.

Maslow conceptualized this picture of an inherent human nature in what he called “the hierarchy of needs.” At the base is our fundamental need for food. A starving person can think of little else, but once he or she can get their three squares a day, the need for a home, for some fixed shelter, starts to take precedence. As Colin Wilson remarked writing about Maslow, every hobo dreams of a little cottage with roses round the border.

Once we secure a home—even if it is only a room—the need for love and relationship takes over. After this comes the last of what Maslow calls “deficiency needs”: needs for things we lack. This is the self-esteem need, the desire for the good opinion of others. The phenomenon of social media seems to me evidence that, in the developed world at least, society as a whole has attained this level on Maslow’s hierarchy, with our competition for likes and desire to be noticed, to be influencers. The rise in teenage suicides linked to low self-esteem through online abuse seems to corroborate this idea.

Yet Maslow recognized that there is a fifth level to his hierarchy, one that relates to what he called “creative” or “meta” or “being needs.” These do not concern lacks but are focused on our need to use our powers, talents, and abilities. Maslow discovered that the failure to do this can have harmful effects. A woman who came to see him for counseling told him her life had lost all meaning. She suffered from insomnia, loss of appetite, and boredom, and had even stopped menstruating. She had been a brilliant psychology student and had planned to go on to graduate school. Her plans changed when she was offered a well-paying position as a supervisor at a chewing gum factory. It was the Depression, and she was supporting her unemployed extended family. The work was welcome but dull, and she felt she was wasting her life. Maslow advised her to take classes at night school. This did the trick; once she started using her intelligence, her depression lifted and even her physical symptoms disappeared. For Maslow, “any talent, any capacity was also a motivation, a need, an impulse.” Failure to meet such needs can stop us in our tracks.

Maslow may not have known this, but he had hit upon an insight conveyed in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which tells us that “if you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Maslow knew this instinctively. Instead of looking at childhood trauma or telling the woman how lucky she was to have the job, he saw that she was being prevented from bringing forth what was within her, that is, her intelligence and creativity. Once she was able to do this, her life had meaning again.

Our metaneeds are all part of the one central need we all possess: the need to self-actualize. This is similar to what Jung calls individuation, our inbuilt urge to become who we are, to be wholly and truly ourselves. While Jung saw this as a process of psychic integration, bringing the conscious and unconscious minds together in a fruitful, creative union, Maslow approached it in a more extraverted way, through the active use of our inborn abilities rather than through an exploration of dreams and other expressions of the unconscious.

Both Maslow and Jung saw creative work as a means of achieving actualization, although for Maslow it was the work itself, and not necessarily what message it might convey, that was essential. And by creative work, we needn’t mean only great works of art: we are not all Beethovens. Such creativity could be expressed in more humble ways, the essential ingredient being a need to do something well, for its own sake, not for some utilitarian purpose.

Maslow also came to see that people who did pursue these metaneeds were subject to sudden moments of happiness and joy that he called “peak experiences.” These moments of unsolicited bliss were not sought out, as some have suggested: the evidence for peak experiences did not come from thrill seekers skydiving or climbing Everest (although, to be sure, such pursuits may prompt a peak). They came from everyday activities and a sudden realization of what we can call reality.

Maslow told the story of a Marine who had not seen a woman for two years. When stationed back at camp, he saw a nurse and was struck dumb by the difference between men and women, something he knew but had forgotten. Maslow also gives the example of a mother getting her children and husband off to school and work, suddenly realizing how much she loved them and how lucky she was.

Other examples suggest the same insight: peaks do not reveal some strange, mystical otherworld, but are moments when we see reality freshly, as if for the first time. At these moments, what Colin Wilson calls our “indifference threshold” is temporarily lowered, and we realize the value of what we have taken for granted. The content of a peak experience is the same as the content of a nonpeak experience. The difference is that in a peak, we are really seeing what is there all the time. Paraphrasing the poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, we can say that in peaks, we do not see different things, but see things differently.

Maslow believed that peaks could not be produced at will, a remark that his critics, like James Hillman, who believe his work is at heart hedonistic and ignorant of life’s “vales,” should reflect on. Peaks come and go when they please, although we can work to create the conditions for their appearance.

Maslow told Wilson that once he got his students thinking and talking about peaks, they began to have them more frequently. To Wilson, this suggested that simply remembering peaks and grasping their reality could bring them on. We can say these people brought on peaks by using their imagination.

Maslow later came to speak of what he called “plateau experiences,” moments of insight and clarity that, although not as ecstatic and emotional as peaks, nevertheless reveal the world to be a much more fascinating and meaningful place than we often believe it to be. Such plateaus could be brought on by meditation, listening to music, making love, or simply looking at a flower, if we perform these activities with our full selves instead of rushing through them in our usual hurried way.

Maslow was always a controversial thinker, although a certain reluctance and professional prudence led to some of his most controversial ideas remaining unpublished. He was not keen on the student radicals of the 1960s, detested the takeover of Cornell University when he was there, and had little good to say about the rising hippie culture. Like Joseph Campbell, he did not condemn American involvement in Vietnam. He was part of the so-called Greatest Generation and believed in the merits of hard work and integrity.

Towards the end of his life, Maslow was troubled by the reflection that although they are capable of it, not everyone reaches the self-actualization level. He began to explore the reasons for this and reached conclusions that our egalitarian-minded time may find objectionable. Because our needs are ultimately biological, some people may simply be more prone to actualization than others because it is in their biology to be so, just as some people are taller, faster, or stronger than others.

In his last, unpublished papers, Maslow began to speak of the possibility of a “biological elite”: individuals who pass beyond the self-esteem level on the hierarchy of needs because their nature compels them to. He began to wonder if these actualizers would face some resentment from the majority of nonpeakers, and wondered what sort of social and economic trade-offs could be arranged so that the different types could live together amicably.

Maslow died before he could confirm his late thoughts. Whether self-actualizers face or will face some kind of pressure from the nonactualized majority remains to be seen. Anyone interested in what self-actualizing may mean for them can discover this in Maslow’s writings. Today we hear a great deal about the importance of getting back to nature. It can do us no harm to follow Maslow’s lead and get back to human nature too.

Sources

Hoffmann, Edward. The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1988.

Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 1976.

———. Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow. Edited by Edward Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1996.

———. Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences. New York: Viking, 1970.

———. Toward a Psychology of Being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968.

Wilson, Colin. New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution. New York: Taplinger, 1972.

Gary Lachman is the author of many books about consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, including Dreaming Ahead of Time; The Return of Holy Russia; Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump; Lost Knowledge of the Imagination; and Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. He has written biographies of C.G. Jung, H.P. Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Emanuel Swedenborg, P.D. Ouspensky, and Aleister Crowley. He lectures around the world, and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a founding member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has contributed articles to Quest for over twenty-five years. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk, www.facebook.com/GVLachman/ and twitter.com/GaryLachman.

 

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Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Keast, Teresa,  "The Spiritual Awakening of the Third Eye" Quest 111:1, pg 31-35

By Teresa Keast

I would like to explore what awakening the third eye means and how and when this occurs, with a view to understanding where our spiritual evolution is potentially taking us both individually and collectively as this psychic center opens.

In ancient Egypt, the third eye was known as the seat of the spirit or soul and used as a route to higher awareness and consciousness. Buddhists relate it to spiritual awakening, and Hindus to intuition and clairvoyance. The third eye is associated with the Eye of Horus, the Eye of Shiva, the straight poised snake of the caduceus, and the horn of the unicorn. It is the “eye” referred to in Matthew 6:22: “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” It is an organ of true vision, which opens in direct response to the individual’s spiritual development.

But first let us explore this world of the two eyes, the material world we call “reality.” We know from Ancient Wisdom teachings and the scientific conclusions of Einstein and his cohorts that we will only really understand the world when we understand that all is energy and vibration.

We know esoterically that what appears real and solid, existing in time and space in our sensory world, is simply energy vibrating at a low frequency. We see, hear, feel, and interact through our senses in this phenomenal world and believe it is real; many believe it is all there is. But our true nature exists in other dimensions.

When we close our eyes and go deep into meditation, this phenomenal world disappears and we contact a peace and stillness, an essence that we call our soul. It is multidimensional, existing in realms in which there is no time and space, at a vibrational frequency beyond the perception of our senses. In occultism we call this the noumenal world. We cannot see or seek the soul with our normal vision, but with our inner vision, we can know and experience its existence on higher planes.

Quantum physics confirms that 99.9 percent of solid matter is made up of empty space, within which the atoms and subatomic particles behave as vortices of energy in constant motion. With closer analysis, these behave with the characteristics of wave energy, only collapsing into particles of solid matter when viewed by the consciousness of the observer. From this, we can conclude that the material world only exists when we observe it.

Esoterically, our noumenal soul works in the material world through a phenomenal body of matter. Again, science tells us that the dense physical form that we see before us is an illusion due to the reaction of the eye to light and our brain’s interpretation of this electrical impulse. What we see is determined by our mind’s interpretation of the energy that entered our eye. We can only see that to which we can attach meaning and understanding. An example of this is the inability of most people to see and experience the fairy kingdom or the energy interplay between living beings.

The truth is we are energy beings, light beings, and our true form is our etheric energy body rather than our dense physical body. We are in essence the spark of the divine, the light of the central sun, that is within us all. In this way we come to realize and understand that we are in the world but not of it.

A further example comes from the Theosophical understanding that our brain is simply a transmitter or receiving station for the impulses emanating from our mind, which exists only on the mental plane. This is why science still cannot find intelligence, memory, instincts, or thoughts in the brain.

Our physical bodies are not solid but composed of vibrating energy; our mind is not of this world and exists only on the mental plane; and likewise our emotions exist only as vibrations in our astral body. We can conclude that our entire personality vehicle and the material world in which it operates are illusions.

But we are in this phenomenal world of low-frequency vibrational energies in order to realize who we are in truth. We are in manifestation to embody the higher vibrational energy of the noumenal world and bring it down into the material world, to spiritualize matter. The key to navigating this material world is to accept that it is an illusion while acknowledging that we are here to heal, transmute, and lose our attachment to it and realize our God Self, our light Self—our true identity.

Etheric vision, the power to see the energy substance of all things, is true vision, just as our etheric energy body is our true body. But until more individuals grow spiritually and our race evolves to the point where all people can see etherically, our eyes will see and respond to the lower vibrations of physical matter only, and we will believe that this is the true reality.

H.P. Blavatsky described this understanding in The Secret Doctrine: 

Māyā or illusion is an element which enters into all finite things, for everything that exists has only a relative, not an absolute reality, since the appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends upon his power of cognition . . .

Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities. The existences belonging to every plane of being, up to the highest Dhyāni-Chohans are, in degree, of the nature of shadows cast by a magic lantern on a colorless screen; but all things are relatively real, for the cognizer is also a reflection, and the things cognized are therefore as real to him as himself. Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognize any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities. As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed, we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached “reality”; but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Māyā . . .

The impalpable atoms of gold scattered through the substance of a ton of auriferous quartz may be imperceptible to the naked eye of the miner, yet he knows that they are not only present there but that they alone give his quartz any appreciable value; and this relation of the gold to the quartz may faintly shadow forth that of the noumenon to the phenomenon. But the miner knows what the gold will look like when extracted from the quartz, whereas the common mortal can form no conception of the reality of things separated from the Māyā which veils them, and in which they are hidden. Alone the Initiate, rich with the lore acquired by numberless generations of his predecessors, directs the “Eye of Dangma” toward the essence of things in which no Māyā can have any influence. (Secret Doctrine, 1:39‒40, 45)

 

Now that we understand that the opening of the third eye is paramount to true spiritual awakening and a realization of our true nature, let’s understand more about this organ of true vision.

Physically, the third eye involves the pineal gland, the pituitary gland, and the carotid glands. All must be functioning together to achieve this higher vision.

Imagine these are the three batteries of the flashlight that enables someone to see the truth. These batteries are charged by chakras: vortices of etheric energy contained within our etheric body that interact with the physical body through the glands.

The pineal gland responds to light and influences hundreds of hormonal reactions in our body that govern many of its natural rhythms and functions. This gland developed millions of years ago, before the development of our intelligent, reasoning frontal cortex and our two eyes. This was the eye of the Cyclops, the giants in Lemurian times. Science suggests it is a remnant of an organ left over from the days of amphibians and reptiles. In normal children, it develops until the age of seven years and then withers away to atrophy by adolescence, with only its physical functions remaining.

Blavatsky suggests the third eye is stored for use in eons to come and in time will reemerge as an organ of higher vision capable of supersensory powers. But first the intellect of humanity has to unfold until such a time as it is no longer the dominant guiding power and the inner vision or intuition from the higher planes of buddhi is reawakened. The intellect must be experienced before it can be transcended.

The third eye is not an etheric chakra but is related to the ajna, crown, and alta major chakra centers. The alta major is the alter ego of the evolved throat chakra. It is not an endocrine gland but relates to the pineal, pituitary, and carotid glands. It is an etheric organ with a pure lens that emerges with the spiritual growth of the integrated personality. It develops from the interplay and radiation of these three centers, allowing this vortex of energy to attract the energies of atma, buddhi, and higher manas to form a great lens of psychic function. Each of the chakras is a battery; all must be present and fully charged so the light of the third eye can be switched on.

The electrical energy for these batteries flows from the causal body, the vehicle of consciousness that houses the soul.

In the average human, these energies hardly gain access to the personality, but in the spiritual man they gain access to the etheric body through the antahkarana. But it is only in integrated and coordinated personalities, tested by initiation, that a stable, open antahkarana presides and can channel ever-increasing energies of the soul into the chakras. Through this process of energizing, the third eye becomes an instrument of the will of the soul or Higher Self attuned to the will of God: “Let my will be thy Will.”

These three head centers converge to form a triangle of amazing potency, powerfully blending the three main energies of the three major rays of Will and Power, Love-Wisdom, and Active Intelligence. This latent power of the three rays becomes manifest as a blazing light that enables the soul-infused personality to direct and synthesize these triple energies, and perform powerful work in service to mankind. As Alice Bailey observes:

One of the fundamental rules back of all magical processes is that no man is a magician or worker in white magic until the third eye is opened, or in the process of opening, for it is by means of that eye that the thought-form is energised, directed and controlled and the lesser builders or forces are swept into any particular line of activity. (Bailey, 1008)

When the third eye is opened, the disciple can become clairvoyant: able to know information about an object, person, or situation through extrasensory perception. They may be clairsentient—“clear feeling”—able to pick up on extrasensory knowledge via nontangible feelings, or perhaps clairaudient: hearing that which is usually inaudible. There develops an ability to “know” that does not come from any prior knowledge in the world. Other capacities include seeing etherically, recognizing disease states and major issues in the lives of others, and accessing past lives and the Akashic Records. The individual is also able to live intuitively, to be in touch with causes rather than effects, to be aware of dimensions and energies of which most people have no awareness, to connect with others telepathically, and to work powerfully with group consciousness. Latent powers become available that enable one to understand and use energy for healing, manifesting thought forms, and interacting with life spiritually.

Be aware that the opening of the third eye sensitizes the individual such that living, being, and relating in the material world can become difficult, creating a need to regularly retreat to keep the vibrational energy high and attuned to the world of the soul. On a deeper level, the disciple may become acutely aware that they are in the world but not of it.

The third eye will open naturally with personality integration and coordination and a commitment to living, not just studying, knowledge of a spiritual life. In this way, the developing attributes and capacities will naturally be used in service for the greater good, as the disciple becomes increasingly aware of their particular part in the conscious evolution of mankind. Usually integration is followed by a soul quickening and rapid development.

There is considerable caution surrounding techniques that attempt to open the third eye before there is sufficient soul contact or personality integration, as serious mental and physical health effects can result. For example, when opened through drugs or other hallucinogenic substances, it can cause irreparable damage to the brain, burn out the nervous system, or overstimulate certain chakras that are not ready for the resulting energies. Moreover, the new capacities may not be used for the greatest good of humanity.

The clairvoyance of an opened third eye is not to be confused with psychism, which is an ability to read the astral plane or astral body of an individual. The psychic realm is only one level above the physical realm and interpenetrates it to a large extent. Many mediums and psychically sensitive people are able to access this realm. In doing so, one immediately opens up to the deception, delusion, and confusion that abound in a vibrational frequency that includes every thought, word, emotion, imagination, experience, and act of humankind, past and present. Mme. Blavatsky described the psychic realm as “the great deceiver” and emphasized that psychic vision can never penetrate beyond the astral plane.

Now let us consider the implications as more aspirants and disciples are moving toward increasing soul contact, personality integration, and potentially opening their third eye of true vision.

At present, the majority of people in the world remain polarized in the chakras below the diaphragm, treading the path of experience and involution, with minimal soul contact. At the same time, I believe that recent worldwide events may have accelerated the numbers of people who are waking up and taking the first initiation. As they become increasingly disillusioned with the phenomenal world and are drawn to seek answers inwardly, they may be inclined to take steps toward soul contact and the subsequent challenges of personality integration.

Increasing numbers in the world today are opening the heart and throat centers and approaching the second initiation with a commitment to their soul path. There is a growing understanding of the need to move congested energies from the solar plexus chakra to the heart with the corresponding inpouring of the Christ consciousness, which enables the transmutation of the lower desire nature to heartfelt altruistic service. For example, when latent anger releases and forgiveness arises, or fear is transformed to courage, as attachment to the material world is replaced by gratitude for its blessings, and whenever there is a shift from individual to group consciousness. Through study, meditation, and living a spiritual life, guided intuitively from within, the heart energy flows up to the ajna chakra to vivify and enliven the third eye center.

As many turn from attachment to the material world of form and realize their calling of service to mankind, we see increasing numbers living their highest ideals, recognizing the link between thoughts and the agitation of the mind and body, and having the courage to express truth as they understand it, enabling the throat center to open and the energies rise to the alta major center. As the personality begins the process of reorganization and realignment, the individual walks their talk and becomes a person of honor, loyalty, and integrity.

With the increased prevalence of visualization, meditation, and mindfulness practices, many are moving toward opening the crown chakra, with a growing awareness of the oneness that connects us all and lies behind all of existence. We see this as people come to understand energy and energy exchanges between all living beings in health and healing. Words that describe this increasing unity consciousness are increasingly commonplace in pop songs and business mission statements and among groups working with awareness and a global perspective.

 Like the symbol of the caduceus, the energies move between chakras via the alternating ida and pingala nadi channels, eventually opening the flow through the central sushumna channel. Consequently, the spiritual forces of fire rise to enlighten the whole being. We witness increasing awareness of qi gong, tai chi, yoga, and breathing practices, which open and enliven the flow of etheric energy. Many have come to recognize this as imperative to physical, emotional, and mental well-being.

We will see increasing numbers of people making soul contact and expressing the qualities of the soul in their everyday interactions, so that right relations within themselves and with others becomes possible and increasingly prevalent.

We will see an increased expression of the qualities of atma, buddhi, and higher manas in the manifest world. Atma, characterized by a connection with universal wisdom, enables enhanced mental power and a soul directed will to act in congruence with this alignment. Buddhi and the opening of the higher heart qualities of forgiveness, acceptance, understanding, kindness, compassion, impeccability, and unconditional love will arise as the qualities of Love-Wisdom are expressed through the astral body. The active intelligence of higher manas will pour down into concrete, analytical lower minds, allowing wisdom to replace knowledge and lifting the mind to the true mental understanding of the Higher Self.

There are many practices, including breathing and meditation techniques, to augment the development of the third eye. Rather than pursuing these techniques, I would suggest that those who are spiritually inclined focus on personality integration and coordination until they have reached the required level of soul contact. In teaching yoga and meditation, I have found that the qualities you need will come to you naturally as part of an intuitive soul journey.

As increasing numbers develop the organ of spiritual perception, the evolution of human consciousness will accelerate. This will lift the vibrational energy of the masses, enacting profound positive change in all areas of life, from education to politics to care for our beloved planet. We will see profound changes in how we live and interact with each other. We will also see the development of right relations in all aspects of human living and endeavor. Some of the ideals that will manifest include telepathic communication, living in cooperation and true community, evolved leaders, education that includes Ancient Wisdom teachings, and a true commitment to living in harmony with our planet and all living creatures who share her with us.

When any one individual raises their consciousness, this raises the consciousness of all. From the excellent work of David Hawkins in his book Power versus Force, we know that just one individual resonating at frequencies of love, peace, and compassion can raise the vibration of millions who are mired in lower, darker energies and manifestations of fear. A mere 15 percent of the population can counterbalance the negativity of 85 percent of humanity and save mankind from self-destruction.

The opening of the third eye has implications for rapid advances in psychological healing of trauma and conflict resolution that so mires human relations. Awakened healers can bridge the conscious and unconscious mind and be aware of past lives and their influences and the effects of karma. This too will accelerate growth and reorient personalities toward their soul path.

There opens the potential for the development of direct manifestation of thought: ideas that advanced initiates can clothe in physical and etheric energy and bring into being. If used for the greater good, this could solve our economic, energy, and resource challenges.

As more individuals open the third eye to live an intuitive soul-guided life, we will see greater communication with the deva realm, conscious working with the elemental builders, and an increased awareness of the multitude of different dimensions. There opens the potential for greater contact with beings of higher vibrational energies in solar systems beyond ours.

The changes in vibrational frequency that result when the third eye opens will enact physical changes in the DNA of mankind (as is predicted for the Sixth Root Race), resulting in bodies that are physically stronger and more disease-resistant—a “super race” of humans. This opening will revolutionize our understanding of health, prana, disease, and the methods of rebalancing the body and allowing its natural healing process to work. Psychic surgery, for example, will replace physical surgery.

We need to remember that the spiritual awakening of the third eye enables one to play a powerful part in the planetary evolution of consciousness. It is never simply for the sole benefit of the individual, but also acts as a compass to help and guide others to heal, grow, and transform.

The key to awakening is to live your spiritual understanding every day. Regular practice of meditation and mindfulness empower the crucial development of your intuition and discrimination. Transmuting the unredeemed aspects of your astral desire nature enable the rise of the necessary energies to the higher centers. The choice to live harmlessly and foster right thought, intention, and action will nurture the expression of the soul qualities of truth, beauty, and goodness in the way you live your life and give in service to the world. The spiritual awakening of your third eye will be a natural consequence of living from such intentions.

Sources

Bailey, Alice A. A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. New York: Lucis, 1925.

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine, Volume 1: Cosmogenesis. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Teresa Keast is a longtime student of the Ancient Wisdom teachings. She lives in Chester, U.K., working as a yoga and meditation teacher and as a speaker and writer for the Theosophical Society UK. To connect with more of her work, go to her website, www.teresa4yoga.co.uk, or her Youtube channel, where a talk on the subject of this article is available.

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Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch,  "The Parapsychology Revolution: The Extraordinary Progress of the “Elusive Science" Quest 111:1, pg 18-27

 By Mitch Horowitz

I believe that our culture is poised for an epochal change in how we understand and accept the core findings of parapsychology—that is, acceptance of the empiricism of the extraphysical. Rejectionism tends to harden on the brink of seismic change, and we are seeing pockets of that as well. But the outcome of the present moment is, I believe, the acknowledgment that we possess indelible evidence of an extraphysical component to life.

The formal scientific scrutiny of anomalous phenomena marked its starting point in 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London by scientists including F.W.H. Myers (who coined the term telepathy for mind-to-mind communication) and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James.

At its inception, parapsychology sought to test mediumistic phenomena under controlled conditions. The early SPR worked with rigor to hold spirit mediums to proof. Researchers such as the strong-willed Hodgson and  James himself ventured to the séance table intent on safeguarding against fraud and documenting claimed phenomena, including physical mediumship, after-death communication, and clairvoyance or what is today called channeling. They probed unexplained cases, exposed frauds, and created historical controversies that have lingered until today. But they were working largely within the lace-curtained settings of Victorian parlors. On the whole, SPR researchers were not functioning in clinical environments, so-called white coat lab settings. The American chapter of the SPR, meanwhile, was stymied by factional disputes between members more interested in the after-death survival thesis and those committed to the more conservative direction of documenting mental phenomena.

I do not intend to leave the impression that lab-based study of psychical phenomena was absent. In the 1880s, Nobel laureate and SPR president Charles Richet, one of France’s most highly regarded biologists, studied telepathy with subjects under hypnosis. Richet also introduced the use of statistical analysis in ESP card tests, presaging today’s near-universal use of statistics throughout the psychological and social sciences. In the early 1920s, French engineer René Warcollier conducted a series of experiments on long-distance telepathy. Sigmund Freud himself pondered the possibilities of telepathy, sometimes delaying publication of key statements posthumously to avoid professional fallout. This was the case with Freud’s “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” his earliest paper on the topic written in 1921—but withheld from publication until 1941, two years after his death. (This was likely at the urging of his English biographer Ernest Jones, who found the topic professionally compromising.)

The paranormal burgeoned into an acknowledged, if hotly debated, academic field thanks largely to ESP researcher J.B. Rhine (1895‒1980) and his wife and intellectual partner Louisa Rhine (1891‒1983). In the late 1920s and early ’30s, the Rhines established the research program that became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, which made paradigmatic advances in the scientific study of ESP.

The Rhines trained as statisticians and botanists at the University of Chicago, where both received doctorates (a considerable rarity for a woman then). In Chicago in 1922, they were inspired by a talk on Spiritualism by English author Arthur Conan Doyle. With his eyes on greater horizons, J.B. soon grew restless in his chosen career. “It would be unpardonable for the scientific world today to overlook evidences of the supernormal in our world,” he told what must have been a mildly surprised audience of scientific agriculturalists at the University of West Virginia.

The Rhines began casting around, venturing to Columbia University and Harvard seeking opportunities to combine their scientific training with their metaphysical interests. Initial progress proved fitful. As often occurs in life, just before they gave up their immense efforts, an extraordinary opportunity appeared. In 1930, with the support of Duke’s first president, William Preston Few, the new chairman of Duke’s psychology department, William McDougall, made J.B. Rhine a formal part of the campus.

Although the founding of Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory is often dated to that year, the program was not christened the Parapsychology Laboratory until 1935, where it remained until 1965. Today the Rhine Research Center continues as an independent lab off campus. It proved a watershed episode in which parapsychology was formally folded into an academic structure and study of the psychical became a profession.   

At Duke, J.B. Rhine did not quite originate but popularized the phrase extrasensory perception, or ESP, which soon became a household term. The work begun at Duke’s Parapsychology Lab in the early 1930s has continued among different researchers, labs, and universities to the present day. The effort is to provide impeccably documented evidence that human beings participate in some form of existence that exceeds cognition, motor skill, and commonly observed biological functions—that we participate in trackable, replicable patterns of extra-physicality that permit us, at least sometimes, to communicate and receive information in a manner that surpasses generally acknowledged sensory experience and means of data conveyance. This field of exchange occurs independently of time, space, or mass. 

We have also accumulated a body of statistical evidence for psychokinesis (i.e., mind over matter) and precognition or what is sometimes called retrocausality, in which events in the future affect the present. For several years, Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Northern California, has performed and replicated experiments in precognition in which subjects display bodily stressors, such as pupil dilation or increased heart rate, seconds before being shown distressing or emotionally triggering imagery.

These are fleeting references to a handful of recent findings from modern parapsychology. I am going to make a statement, and I am then going to argue for it: we possess heavily scrutinized, replicable statistical evidence for an extraphysical component of the human psyche. For decades, this evidence has appeared in—and been reproduced for—traditional, academically based journals, often juried by scientists without sympathy for its findings. This evidence has been procured and replicated under rigorous clinical conditions. It demonstrates that the individual possesses or participates in a facet of existence that surpasses what is known to us biologically, psychologically, sensorily, and technologically. In short: ESP exists.

The search for greater dimensions of life is as old as humanity itself. But what is new and revolutionary is the advent of science as a method of protocols to identify processes that affirm primordial humanity’s basic instinct for the extraphysical. As noted, this places our generation before a remarkable precipice. It is one that we have not yet been able to cross.

The precipice is the philosophy called materialism, by which Western life has organized itself for nearly 300 years. Philosophical materialism holds that matter creates itself, and that your mind is strictly an epiphenomenon of your brain. Furthermore, thoughts are a localized function of gray matter which, like bubbles in a glass of carbonated water, are gone once the water is gone. And that is the extent of the psyche.

That philosophy is obsolete. Firstly, an enormous amount of data has amassed verifying both the perceptual basis of reality and the extraphysical—gathered through the same methodology that materialism purports to defend. Secondly, we face the progressing realization that materialism is simply a position, a theory, an ideology, of which science is independent.

This does not mean that materialism will fade gently. Its outlook—that matter evinces no calculable reality beyond classical mechanics and that all contrary evidence or implications are false because they contradict its founding premise—will retain influence for decades. The materialist perspective is concretized within key parts of our culture and media. Many opinion-shaping personalities hold to it with conviction.

What evidence exists for my claims of science affirming the infinite? Here I return to Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory in the early 1930s. Rhine’s innovation as a researcher was developing clear, repeatable, and unimpeachable methods, with rigor and without drama or speculation, for testing and statistically mapping evidence for anomalous communication and conveyance. To attempt this, Rhine initially created a series of card-guessing tests that involved a deck called Zener cards designed by psychologist Karl E. Zener. Zener cards are a five-suit deck, generally with twenty-five cards in a pack, with symbols that are easily and immediately recognizable: circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and five-pointed star. After a deck is shuffled, subjects are asked to attempt blind hits on what symbol will turn up.

Probability dictates that if you are operating from random chance over large spreads, you are going to hit 20 percent, or one out of five. But Rhine discovered, across tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of rigorously safeguarded trials (by 1940, the database included nearly a million trials) that certain individuals, rather than scoring 20 percent, would score 25 percent, 26 percent, 27 percent, sometimes 28 percent (and in select cases a great deal higher).

At the time, social scientists commonly withheld negative sets of data on the questionable grounds that something was flawed with the methodology. Rhine reversed this practice early on at his lab and helped lead the overall social sciences to do so. All of the data were reported. Nothing was withheld in the file drawer. No negative sets were excluded.

In Rhine’s work, every precaution was taken against corruption, withholding, or pollution of data, which was also opened to other researchers (and non-research-based critics) for replication, vetting, and review. In a letter of March 15, 1960, to mathematician and foundation executive Warren Weaver, Rhine spoke of the extra lengths to which the parapsychologist ought to go: “Even though the methodology and standards of evidence may compare favorably with other advances of natural science, they have to be superior in parapsychology because of its novelty; and conceivably, too, by making them still better, everything may be gained in overcoming the natural resistance involved.”

The “natural resistance” or partisanship around such findings can be so intense—and sometimes purposefully obfuscating—that lay seekers may come away with the mistaken impression that Rhine’s work, or that of more recent parapsychologists, has proven unrepeatable or compromised.

The parapsychologist Charles Honorton (1946‒92) sought to analyze critical challenges to Rhine’s figures in the years following their publication. He found that “61 percent of the independent replications of the Duke work were statistically significant. This is 60 times the proportion of significant studies we would expect if the significant results were due to chance or error.”

Rhine’s experiments have proven so bulletproof that even close to fifty years later, his most resistant critics were still attempting to explain them by fantastical (and often feckless) fraud theories, including a prominent English skeptic’s nearly vaudevillian supposition that one of the test subjects repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at cards through a trapdoor over the lab. At such excesses, rationalists fail the test that Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1772) set for validation of miracles: counterclaims must be less likely than reported phenomena. In any case, Rhine’s methods and results have never been upended.

For all that, Rhine may have proved too idealistic regarding what it took to overcome “natural resistance.” Mainstream media sources engage in pushback and even disingenuousness against data from parapsychology. A prime example appears in how polemical skeptics today ride herd over articles on parapsychology on the most-read reference source in history, Wikipedia. As of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on Zener cards states in its opening, “The original series of experiments have been discredited and replication has proven elusive.” This statement is unsourced, something that would get red-flagged on most of the encyclopedia’s articles.

How does this occur on the world’s go-to reference source? Dean Radin of IONS, described to me the problem of an ad hoc group calling itself “Guerilla Skeptics” policing Wiki entries on parapsychology: “While there are lots of anonymous trolls that have worked hard to trash any Wikipedia pages related to psi, including bios of parapsychologists, this group of extreme skeptics is proudly open that they are rewriting history . . . any attempt to edit those pages, even fixing individual words, is blocked or reverted almost instantly.”

Even if parapsychology as a field had ended with Rhine’s initial Duke trials, we would possess evidence of paranormal mechanics in human existence. Those basic (though painstakingly structured) card experiments, those few percentage points of deviation tracked across tens of thousands of trials (90,000 in the database by the 1934 publication of Extra-Sensory Perception), demonstrate an anomalous transfer of information in a laboratory setting and an extraphysical (call it metaphysical), non-Newtonian exchange of information. 

But things did not end there. In the decades ahead, extraordinary waves of diversified experiments occurred in the U.S. and other nations growing from the efforts of the scientists at Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory. These efforts demonstrated, again and again, anomalous mental phenomena, including precognition, retrocausality, telepathy, and psychokinesis (PK). Rhine’s lab began studying PK in 1934, an effort that continued until 1941, after which many lab members were summoned to the war effort. During their nine years of investigation, researchers conducted tens of thousands of runs in which individuals would attempt to affect throws of random sets of dice. Devices were soon employed to toss the dice in such a way that ensured randomness, which ought to demonstrate no pattern whatsoever. Again, similar statistical results to the Zener card experiments appeared: among certain individuals, across hundreds of thousands of throws, with every conceivable safeguard, peer review, methodological transparency, and reportage of every set, there appeared a deviation of several percentage points, suggesting a physical effect arising from mental intention.

We have now logged generations of experiments designed to test the effects to which I am referring. Today’s parapsychologists believe, I think with justification, that the basic, foundational science for psychical ability has already been laid. Although parapsychology remains controversial, the field has already moved on from basic testing for ESP, a matter that was more or less settled in the 1940s. 

Recent researchers are concerned with questions including telepathy (mind to mind communication); precognition (the ability to foresee or be affected by things that, within our model of the mind, have not yet occurred); retrocausality (the effect of future events on current perceptions or abilities); a biological basis for psi (including biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field theories); spontaneous psi events, such as premonitions or crisis realizations; dream telepathy; a “global consciousness” effect during periods of mass emotional reaction; and the practice of remote viewing or clairvoyance. The field also investigates other important areas, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, after-death survival, and reincarnation.

The scientific study of reincarnation was pioneered as an academic field by the remarkable research psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918‒2007), who founded the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. For five decades, this conservative researcher “traveled six continents, accumulating more than 2,500 cases of young children who recounted details of previous lives, which he meticulously verified with witnesses, hospital records, autopsy reports, death certificates, and photographs,” eulogized the Journal of Near-Death Studies in Spring 2007.

One of the most important figures in psychical research died of heart failure in 1992 at the tragically young age of forty-six. I mentioned him earlier: his name is Charles Honorton. Honorton’s passing was a tremendous loss for the field, nearly equivalent to losing Einstein at the dawn of his relativity theories.

It is critical to understand what Honorton accomplished. In the late 1960s and ’70s, he engaged in direct research into dreams and ESP at the innovative Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Honorton proceeded to assemble possibly the most significant body of data we possess in the parapsychology field. It was through a long-running series of experiments designed with colleagues in the 1970s and ’80s known as ganzfeld experiments. Ganzfeld is German for whole or open field. Honorton had an instinct for the conditions under which ESP or telepathy—mind-to-mind communication—might be heightened, which formed the basis of his studies.

Honorton noted that the classic Rhine experiments were largely focused on subjects believed to have a predilection for ESP. Rhine believed that ESP may be detectable throughout the human population but was readily testable through figures who possess innate abilities. He did not consider ESP something for which you could train or that was necessarily intrinsic to everyone. Rather, he focused on what he considered naturally gifted individuals, who made prime subjects.

Honorton took a different tack. He wondered whether psychical abilities are, in fact, general throughout the population—but perhaps the psychical signal, so to speak, gets jammed or the psyche’s circuitry gets overloaded due to excessive stimuli in daily life.

Honorton pondered what it might reveal to test for ESP among subjects who are placed into conditions of relaxed, comfortable sensory deprivation. He ventured that you may be able to spike the ESP effect if you place a subject into sensory-deprived conditions without noise or bright light—for example, seating the person in a comfortable recliner in a noiseproof, dimly lit room or chamber, fitted with eyeshades, and wearing headphones that emit white noise. These conditions induce the state called hypnagogia, a kind of waking hypnosis.

In fact, you enter into the hypnagogic state twice daily: just before you drift to sleep at night and just as you are coming to in the morning. It is a deeply relaxed, motionless state in which you might experience hallucinatory or morphing images, aural hallucinations, tactile sensations of weightlessness, or even bodily paralysis. Yet you remain functionally awake: you are self-aware and able to direct cognition. The morning state is sometimes called hypnopompia (a term coined by psi research pioneer F.W.H. Myers). Hypnagogia and hypnopompia are similar with some differences; for example, hallucinations occur somewhat more commonly during the nighttime state.

Since this state is an apparently inviting period for self-suggestion—the mind is supple, the body relaxed, and the psyche unclouded by stimuli—Honorton pondered whether these conditions might facilitate heightened psychical activity. To test for telepathy, he placed one subject—called the receiver—into the relaxed conditions of sensory deprivation I have described, while a second subject—called the sender—is seated outside the sensory deprivation tank or in another space. In the classical ganzfeld experiments, the sender attempts to “transmit” a preselected image to the receiver. After the sending period ends, the receiver then chooses among four different images (one target image and three decoys) to identify what was sent.

Like the Zener cards, there is a randomly selected target on each successive trial and, in this case, a one in four or 25 percent chance of guessing right. In meta-analyzed data, subjects on average surpassed the 25 percent guess rate. Depending on the analytic model, the most stringently produced experiments demonstrated an overall hit rate of between 32 percent and 35 percent. Since the mid-1970s, this data has, in varying forms, been replicated by dozens of scientists across different labs in different nations, often under increasingly refined conditions. The ganzfeld experiments not only documented a significant psi effect but also suggested that a detectable ESP or telepathic effect may be more generally distributed among the population. The protocols themselves suggested conditions under which psi phenomena are most likely to appear.

Given its significance, the ganzfeld database attracted intense scrutiny. In a historic first, which has never really been repeated, Honorton in 1986 collaborated on a paper with a prominent psi skeptic, Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. After trading written disputes over the validity of parapsychological experiments, the interlocutors decided to collaborate on a joint study for the Journal of Parapsychology, analyzing the data, highlighting areas of agreement and dispute, and recommending protocols for future experiments. In an arena where arguments often devolve into rhetoric, it proved a signature moment.

“Instead of continuing with another round of our debate on the psi ganzfeld experiments,” they wrote, “we decided to collaborate on a joint communiqué. The Honorton-Hyman debate emphasized the differences in our positions, many of these being technical in nature. But during a recent discussion, we realized that we possessed similar viewpoints on many issues concerning parapsychological research. This communiqué, then, emphasizes these points of agreement.”  

In a joint statement—one that ought to serve as a general guardrail in our era of digital attack speech—Honorton and Hyman wrote: “Both critics and parapsychologists want parapsychological research to be conducted according to the best possible standards. The critic can contribute to this need only if his criticisms are informed, relevant, and responsible.”

Beyond laying down general principles and research protocols, the collaborators conducted a joint meta-analysis of key ganzfeld experiments up to that moment.* “The data base analyzed by Hyman and Honorton,” wrote UC Irvine statistician Jessica Utts, “consisted of results taken from 34 reports written by a total of 47 authors. Honorton counted 42 separate experiments described in the reports, of which 28 reported enough information to determine the number of direct hits achieved. Twenty three of the studies (55%) were classified by Honorton as having achieved statistical significance.” The success rate was similar to Honorton’s findings in his 1978 meta-analysis.

Notably, the psychical researcher and the skeptic wrote in their abstract: “We agree that there is an overall significant effect in this data base that cannot be reasonably explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis.” And further: “Although we probably still differ on the magnitude of the biases contributed by multiple testing, retrospective experiments, and the file-drawer problem, we agree that the overall significance observed in these studies cannot reasonably be explained by these selective factors. Something beyond selective reporting or inflated significance levels seems to be producing the nonchance outcomes. Moreover, we agree that the significant outcomes have been produced by a number of different investigators.”

In sum, here was a key psychical researcher and a leading skeptic (Hyman was among the few skeptics who conducted his own research) disagreeing over the general nature of the ESP thesis—a reasonable disagreement—but affirming that the most important psychical data of the period proved unpolluted and that the methodology of the studies in their sample reflected significant improvement from the dawn of the experiments in the early to mid-1970s. But the key data, they wrote, was free from substantial error, corruption, or selective reporting. Hyman agreed that a statistically significant effect appears in the data and justifies further research. That’s all. No concession of belief in ESP. Nor was any needed. Just an informed critique by a parapsychologist and a career-long skeptic, both with significant credentials, concluding that the data and practices are normative and a statistically significant anomaly appears.

It is tragic, both in terms of human pathos and intellectual advancement, that Honorton died six years after that paper was published. He was one of the only parapsychologists able to reach across the nearly unbridgeable partisan divide to a professional skeptic and create progress in dialogue and research. That process has never been repeated. Indeed, as of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on the ganzfeld experiments introduces them as a “pseudoscientific technique,” without sourcing.

It is worth asking why this chasm has remained so wide. Wonderful strides have occurred in parapsychology, but the advances are not what they could be. Statistician Jessica Utts has noted that during the more than 110 years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, “the total human and financial resources devoted to parapsychology since 1882 is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States.”

For comparison, the American Psychological Association reports that in 2017, $2 billion of the United States’ $66.5 billion in federal research funding went to psychological research.

Think of it: the field of parapsychology has, since its inception worldwide, been funded in adjusted dollars at a rate of less than two months of traditional psychological experiments in the U.S. (experiments which, like much of the work in the social sciences, are routinely overturned to reflect changes or corrections in methodology). That is less than $333,500,000, or a little more than the cost of four fighter jets. This figure compares with trillions that have been spent worldwide during the same period on physics or medical research.

This funding situation reflects, in part, the success of the most vociferous skeptics in disabling the legitimacy of parapsychological data. Most academic researchers steer clear, fearing damage to their reputation and ability to get other projects funded.  

Even in this atmosphere, however, some scientists prevail against the tide. A historic episode occurred in 2011, which marked the publication of a paper called “Feeling the Future” by well-known research psychologist Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University. For about ten years, Bem conducted a series of nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants into precognition or “time reversing” of widely established cognitive or psychological effects, such as memorization of a list or responding to negative or erotic stimuli flashed as images on a screen. Bem’s discoveries demonstrated the capacity of cognition across boundaries of linear time.

Bem, like other researchers including Dean Radin, identified factors that seem to correlate with precognition, such as the body’s response to arousing or disturbing imagery. As Bem wrote of previous experiments: “Most of the pictures were emotionally neutral, but a highly arousing negative or erotic image was displayed on randomly selected trials. As expected, strong emotional arousal occurred when these images appeared on the screen, but the remarkable finding is that the increased arousal was observed to occur a few seconds before the picture appeared, before the computer had even selected the picture to be displayed.”

In one of Bem’s trials, subjects were asked to “guess” at erotic images alternated with benign images. “Across all 100 sessions,” he wrote, “participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1% . . . In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8% . . . This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%.”

The response to either arousing or disturbing imagery is suggestive of the emotional stakes required for the presence of a psi effect. Stakes must exist, and strong emotions must be in play. Passion is critical. In New Frontiers of the Mind, Rhine emphasized the role of spontaneity, confidence, comity, novelty, curiosity, and lack of fatigue. (And, as it happens, caffeine.)

But Bem’s horizons extended further. In the most innovative element of his nine-part study, he set out to discover whether subjects displayed improved recall of lists of words that were to be practice-memorized in the future. In Bem’s words, “whether rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall—even if the rehearsal takes place after the recall test is given.”

Participants were first shown a set of words and given a free recall test of those words. They were then given a set of practice exercises on a randomly selected subset of those words. The psi hypothesis was that the practice exercises would retroactively facilitate the recall of those words, and, hence, participants would recall more of the to-be-practiced words than the unpracticed words.

Bem found a statistically significant improvement of recall on the lists of words studied in the near future: “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.” In short, future memorization heightened current recall.

Unsurprisingly, Bem’s 2011 paper met with tremendous controversy. Within a year of Bem’s publication, a trio of professional skeptics published a rejoinder. Playing off of Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” their paper sported the media-friendly title, “Failing the Future.” The experimenters reran one of Bem’s experiments. They concluded, “All three replication attempts failed to produce significant effects . . . and thus do not support the existence of psychic ability.”

But the authors omitted a critical detail from their own database. By deadline, they possessed two independent studies that validated Bem’s results. They made no mention of these studies, despite their own ground rules for doing so. Bem wrote in his response: “By the deadline, six studies attempting to replicate the Retroactive Recall effect had been completed, including the three failed replications reported by Ritchie et al. and two other replications, both of which successfully reproduced my original findings at statistically significant levels . . . Even though both successful studies were pre-registered on Wiseman’s registry and their results presumably known to Ritchie et al., they fail to mention them in this article” (emphasis added).

Although there unquestionably exists a significant crisis of replicability and data manipulation—not to mention fraud—in the sciences, no one has tied any of this to Bem or his methods. As of July 2020, Bem’s experiments (including the original trials) proved confirmatory in a meta-analysis encompassing 90 experiments in 33 laboratories in 14 countries, “greatly exceeding” the standard for “‘decisive evidence’ in support of the experimental hypothesis,” as Bem and his coauthors wrote in the abstract of their follow-up paper.

 

I believe that I am highlighting only the glacial tip of how parapsychological data is misreported within much of mainstream news media and large swaths of academia. The question returns: why? I have difficulty understanding human nature, which is, finally, the crux of the matter. After a certain point of tautological criticism of nearly a century of academic ESP research, it becomes difficult to avoid using a strong word that I prefer not to use and that I do not use lightly: suppression. Not of any centrally organized sort, but of a cultural sort in which prevailing findings run so counter to materialist assumptions that critics—who ironically perceive themselves as arbiters of rationality—assume an “at any cost” stance to dispel contrary data. Winning becomes more important than proving. It is the antithesis of science. This is the irony to which professional skepticism has brought us.

This kind of practice—in which self-perceived rationalists do injustice to truth in pursuit of what they consider a defense of rationalism—has run riot throughout the professional skeptics’ field. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in addition to his own research into psi phenomena, has proven determined and intrepid in responding to serial problems among professional skeptics and the toll they have taken in reference media and journalism. Sheldrake was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders of the year by Switzerland’s prestigious Duttweiler Institute. Yet today on Wikipedia he is called a purveyor of “pseudoscience” for his theories of biological resonance and psi.

I have already mentioned earlier that the social and natural sciences are experiencing a credibility gap. One study has suggested that fraud rates in biomedical and psychology research are probably at a respective 9 percent and 10 percent.

I consider it defensible to state that parapsychology today may be among the few exceptions to common fraud in the social sciences. When I posted about the matter in late 2021 on social media, parapsychology journalist Craig Weiler put it this way:

Because parapsychology doesn’t convey any honors from successful research, either through social acknowledgment or an improvement in professional status, there is little motivation for cheating. Successful studies also have to run the skeptical gauntlet. So, little incentive . . . Just a personal observation, the field seems to attract uncorruptible people. The people who take it seriously and publicly, have to have a generally reduced fear level and be willing to fight for the importance of truth. That doesn’t describe your average cheater.

Indeed, it is infinitely more important to me as an advocate of parapsychology research that we get it right versus win a debate. I would rather lose ground a hundred times over than proffer an argument that is strictly rhetorical or tactical in nature or that misrepresents key findings when a debate goes against me. That is why I am so flummoxed (perhaps naively) when I encounter self-described skeptics who use deceptive or slippery methods in the interest of promulgating intellectual soundness.

The point is not to win but to search—to honor the basic human question of what lies around the next hill. Our society needs greater academic and intellectual leeway in this area so that parapsychologists need not fear damage to career or reputation. As noted, psi research is inexpensive. Because the skeptics have proven so successful, however, most parapsychologists today must secure independent funding. Anyone who has written grant proposals knows that that process can be the equivalent of a job in itself. But the men and women who populate parapsychology today carry out this labor while also conducting their research and often holding academic or clinical positions to pay the bills. What’s more, they often endure professional insults and calumny. 

I recognize that skeptics fear a wave of irrationality will be unleashed on the world if headlines start announcing, “Harvard Study Says ESP Is Real.” Consequently, they strive against that day (although in various forms it has already come and gone), just as in an exchange with Sigmund Freud, his English disciple Ernest Jones protested that acknowledging telepathy “would mean admitting the essential claim of the occultists that mental processes can be independent of the human body.”

The issues I am describing have easily cost us more than a generation of progress in parapsychology. We are at least thirty or forty years behind where we ought to be, dated from when the professional skeptical apparatus began to ramp up in the mid-1970s.

One real challenge for parapsychology—and addressing this is, I think, necessary to the field’s next leap forward—is to arrive at a theory of conveyance. I believe the field needs a persuasive theoretical model that pulls together the effects and posits how information is transferred in a manner unbound by time, space, distance, linearity, and common sensory experience. Researchers have made preliminary steps in this direction. Advances are overdue.

 

In 1960, Warren Weaver, a highly regarded mathematical engineer and grant-making science foundation executive, uttered a semifamous lament about ESP research at a panel discussion at Dartmouth College: “I find this whole field [parapsychology] intellectually a very painful one. And I find it painful essentially for the following reasons: I cannot reject the evidence and I cannot accept the conclusions.” Weaver caught hell for his statement; some colleagues questioned whether his judgment had slipped; a few others (including Dartmouth’s president) privately thanked him for broaching the topic.

Weaver had toured Rhine’s labs in early 1960. On February 22, he privately wrote Rhine to raise several issues. Near the top of his seven-page, singled-spaced letter, Weaver made this point: “For if you could make substantial progress in analyzing, explaining, and controlling, then the problem of acceptance would be largely solved.” Rhine had long labored to demonstrate effect, Weaver wrote, but he now needed to describe mechanics. His letter continued:

But for three main reasons—or at least so it seems to me—the problem of acceptance remains. First, these phenomena are so strange, so outside the normal framework of scientific understanding, that they are inherently very difficult to accept. Second, the attempts to analyze, understand, and control have not been, as yet, very successful or convincing. And third, unreasonable and stubborn as it doubtless appears to you, very many scientists are not convinced by the evidence which you consider is more than sufficient to establish the reality of the psi phenomena.

            Rhine replied:           

The three main reasons you give in your analysis are recognizably correct. Had you been inclined at this point to go a step further into the intellectual background for these reasons, this might have been the point to draw upon the judgments of some of the philosophers and other commentators who have dealt with the problem of acceptance. There is an increasingly candid recognition of the difficulty as an essentially metaphysical one. Psi phenomena appear to challenge the assumption of a physicalistic universe.

Rhine was reluctant to draw theoretical conclusions from his findings. As his daughter, Sally Rhine Feather, wrote in a private communication to me: “I have never known him to have gone very far in this direction . . . But he was always so cautious at going beyond the data and had this aversion to philosophers who did so—except for the implications of the nonphysical nature of psi on which he actually speculated extremely broadly at times.” She went on to quote from his book New World of the Mind: “It will be the task of biophysics and psychophysics to find out if there are unknown, imperceptible, extraphysical influences in nature that function in life and mind, influences which can interact with detectable physical processes.” 

In his response to Weaver, Rhine was referencing commonly accepted physical laws at the time. For psychical researchers today, studies in quantum theory, retrocausality, extradimensionality, neuroplasticity, string theory, and “morphic fields” that enable communication at the cellular level (the innovation of Rupert Sheldrake) suggest a set of physical laws that surpass the known and may serve as a kind of macroverse within which familiar mechanics are experienced. It was already clear in Rhine’s era that extrasensory transmission could not be explained through a “mental radio” model, since, according to Rhine’s tests and those of others, ESP is unaffected by time, distance, or physical barriers.

This returns us to the question: If the psi effect is real, how does it work? How does mentality exceed the obvious boundaries of sensory transmission?

Perhaps science overvalues theory. Nonetheless, I believe that it falls to each generation to venture a theory of phenomena in which it professes deep interest. That theory can ignite a debate—it can be thrown out and replaced, it can be modified—but I do not believe that researchers and motivated lay inquirers (like me) can eschew the task. For this reason, I attempted a theory of mind causation in the closing chapter of my 2018 book The Miracle Club entitled, “Why It Works.”

Consider this: when you say the word precognition, it strikes many people as fantastical, as though we are entering crystal-ball territory. Why the incredulity? We already know, and have known for generations, that linear time as we experience it is an illusion. Einstein’s theories of relativity, and experiments that have affirmed them, establish that time slows down in conditions of extreme velocity—at or approaching light speed—and in conditions of extreme gravity, like black holes. The individual traveling in a metaphorical spaceship at or near light speed experiences time slowing (not from their perspective but in comparison to those not at that speed), and this is not a mere thought exercise. Space travelers in our era, although they are obviously not approaching anywhere near that velocity, experience minute effects of time reduction.

In short, linear time is a necessary illusion for five-sensory beings to get through life. Time is not an absolute. What’s more, ninety years of work in quantum physics leads us to conclude that we face an infinitude of concurrent realities—not in possibility but in actuality—one of which we will localize or experience within our framework based upon perspective or when we look.

To switch tacks, string theory posits that all of reality is interconnected by vast networks of vibrating strings. Everything, from the tiniest particle to entire universes to other dimensions, is linked by these undulating strings. Hence something that occurs within another dimension not only affects what happens in the reality of the dimension that we occupy but signals an infinitude of events playing out in these other fields of existence, as in ours.

We may even crisscross into these concurrent realities, occupying lives that are infinite in terms of the psyche and variable in dimensional occupancy. Experiencing data or events from other dimensions may also be extrapolated to UFO encounters or other anomalous phenomena.

Perhaps an individual, either because he or she is uniquely sensitive at a given moment or experiences a reduction of sensory data while retaining awareness (as in the ganzfeld experiments), is capable of accessing information—or taking measurements—from other states or dimensions that exist along the theorized bands of strings. We call these measurements precognition, telepathy, ESP, or psychokinesis, the last of which may be a form of preawareness or movement or both. But maybe that is simply what finer measurement looks like. It is possible that measurement not only informs but also (at least in certain cases) actualizes, localizes, and determines. Measurement selects. Perhaps if we gleaned what was actually going on, or exercised fuller capacities of sensation, the experience would prove overwhelming. We would be overcome with data. Hence we may need a linear sense of time and a limited field of information in order to navigate experience.

And yet: given that we understand spacetime as flexible, is it really so strange, so violative of our current body of knowledge, that there exist quantifiable exceptions to ordinary sensory experience? As we document these exceptions, trace their arc, and replicate the conditions under which they occur, perhaps we approach what poet and mystic William Blake foresaw in 1790 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” And thus ineffable.

* A meta-analysis is a cumulative study of different but similar experiments to test pooled data for statistical significance. 

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian and writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library whose books include Occult America, Uncertain Places, and Daydream Believer, from the last of which this article is abridged. Full footnotes appear in the book.

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