Psychology, one of the harshest critics of things experts do not yet understand, is itself a relatively new science. Invented and formulated by pioneers such as Freud and Jung and Adler, it has advanced in basic understandings just as medicine has advanced in technology. Freud had some exceptional ideas about early sexual ex¬ perience or inborn tendencies in human development, but he also formulated and advanced a theory of what the various parts of mind and consciousness might be. Some practitioners in the field of psychology debate even the existence of mind as an actuality, while some adherents of physics insist that there is no such thing as a mind, only a brain. While we won’t venture into these intramural disagreements, it is clear that there are separate compartments in our thoughts and our consciousness.
By 1923, Freud had proposed and described what he rec¬ ognized as three separate levels of the mind: id, ego, and su¬ perego. He felt that what occurred in these three areas of the mind had a strong and direct influence on all we do and say. In sensitivity training, we may work peripherally with some of these pioneering ideas, but add the findings of modem tech¬ nology as well. Numerous studies in Russia, America, and China have at¬ tempted to chart the areas of the brain wave levels to explain things that happen within our consciousness. Some years ago, the phrase alpha level was popular, and was thought to be some mysterious level within which we were more aware of psychic perception. This word alpha refers to a measurable speed of brain wave levels. It is now known that your conscious mind drops into the slower alpha level when you simply close your eyes.
Ordinary consciousness, when a person is awake and alert, is operating on a level of from fourteen to thirty cycles per second. Alpha measures lower, from eight to ten cycles per second. Lower levels include the theta level, four to seven cycles per second, which is found in very relaxed states. Delta, which is commonly found when you are asleep, cycles one and a half to three times per second. In testing procedures used on an individual named Vernon Craig (stage name Komar), who is capable of almost instan taneous self-healing, it was found that when he entered a state of self-healing, the dominant brain wave was the very slow theta cycle.
This finding points the way toward much more research into the physical parameters of healing. Similarly, an¬ imals who are in a phase of recovery from a wound or disease may exhibit these slower brain pulses. It is an interesting fact and should lead to more medical knowledge. The question, then, is where in the mind or brain does ESP take place? Are we more perceptive in a meditative or sleeping state as was the late Edgar Cayce, who usually performed his diagnoses in a hypnotic trance?
Some early research at UCLA showed that excess activity in the rear of the brain took place when ESP was being used. Others found that ESP lowers blood sugar and potassium. Some found that while undergoing boring card-guessing tests similar to the original Rhine experiments at Duke, the brain wave levels dropped into an almost theta rate. Literally, the endless repetition of card trial after card trial was putting the percipient or student into an almost trancclike state. Accuracy dropped fast, and no wonder. The excitement of exploring new skills keeps most of my students in a much more receptive state. We find that total relaxation may be good if you intend to meditate or to sleep, but it is not at all helpful if you’re learning to use ESP!
I have been happy to enlist the findings of science in my own understanding of psi. It was a revelation when the dis¬ tinctions between the two sides of the human brain were de¬ fined according to function. While we knew that the medium-slow alpha level is the one most commonly associated with concentration, it is the right- brain associated theta level that is the seat of what we call creative imagery. For the artist, this is the level in which the creation of a work of art or music begins. The shifting of creative images and thoughts from slower brain wave levels into the faster areas of the waking, alert consciousness are of most interest to us here. What you begin to perceive at these levels must be “trans¬ ferred” from the right side of the brain to the left, or con¬ sciously aware, side. While we do not yet fully understand the mechanism of doing so, we know that this is what occurs.
ESP is no good to you if you must lie down or go into a near-sleeping state to be able to use it. Much of my training involves the physical fact of writing down each perception as it reaches the conscious mind. In order to write, you must be in an awakened and alert state.
Much of the work you will do to learn to use the abilities of remote viewing, psychometry (psychic touch), and precog¬ nition or retrocognition are most easily stimulated by an object or a question directed at your own self. These are used first, as the questions are the result of a patterned habit of analysis that you will learn as you go forward. Sometimes we use a stone or another solid object as a fo¬ cusing point. Although nothing may be known about the item, it will begin sensing processes in the mind and to yield infor¬ mation for your conscious mind to understand and to write down.
Never forget that you must be able to write down every idea, every thought, each image that comes into your mind. The tiniest bit of information is important, perhaps vitally im¬ portant. The oddest and least understandable impression may turn out to be the most specific. Never edit. Never discard any impression just because you do not understand it. Someone else might need just that special tiny fact as an answer, or it may eventually reveal itself to you as one of the most impor¬ tant impressions you received. This writing down of each and every thing is so important to the student of ESP that I cannot stress it enough. Never be without a pad or notebook and a pen, for you never know when you may need them both.
This process was not developed by me. Apparently it was invented in ancient Greece as a way of getting at all possible information on any subject. I learned it as a student of jour¬ nalism, as these questions are the most important ones for any interviewer or reporter learning their craft. The code word is newoty. It is also taught to trainees in police academies, for it is as important to them as it is to a reporter.
These questions are as important to you as they are to the reporter, the television anchor, or the policeman. They are your magic golden keys to the information you need about any object, any question, from which car to buy to which stock to pick; from where an artifact came from to when a prehis¬ toric ax was manufactured. They can tell you who owned a lovely antique locket or who wrote with an ancient pen. They can tell you who committed a crime or who wrote a letter. In short, there is no situation that these special questions cannot solve for you. As you can see by now, they’re very valuable and useful things to know.
PAVLOV’S DOGS Pavlov was a scientist who discovered that dogs could be trained so well that they would salivate when a bell was rung. He did that by consistently ringing the bell whenever food was placed in their bowls. After a lime of such conditioning, the dogs knew that the ringing of the bell told them to expect food. Therefore they had been conditioned so well mentally that their physical response became automatic.
You will not always use all of the newoty questions. There arc times when the question who may be superfluous. You may not need any information about who or any person at all. Similarly, the other questions may not apply to a given project or experiment. For instance, a stock market question might consist of only when and no other. A person looking for buried treasure or for water to dig a well might need only where. A lost piece of jewelry or a misplaced file might also need only where or when , and often that when stimulates not a psychic response but an actual memory of where you put the item and when.
But if the putting and placing was not done by you, or is so far in the past that it is impossible to retrieve by memory, then not the when but the where is applicable. In criminal detection work, we often use all of the questions, as we may be asked to help find a missing person or a murder victim’s body. We might be requested to locate a missing weapon or identify an automobile. We could be asked to pick a suspect out of a photographic layout, or even as happened in one case long ago, to view a suspect through a one-way mirror and tell if he was the one they were looking for. You may have absolutely no interest in criminal work, but you might wish to use newoty to better perform your own job or better understand your family and co-workers. You may wish to use it to increase your income or to choose just the right home or automobile for your family. Maybe you want to learn more about yourself.
SEEING HANDS Still in that midsixties time frame I heard firsthand of an ex¬ periment being conducted on the ability of rabbits to sense the presence above them of a bird of prey like a hawk or an eagle. In the laboratory scientists discovered that because of the positioning of the rabbits’ eyes, they could not easily see any¬ thing in the air above them. Their necks do not easily turn upward, and it was not apparent how they were able to see the birds above them searching for prey. According to the record, the rabbits were wrapped in strips of opaque tape, then a small area of the body was uncovered at a time to sec what would happen when a cardboard outline of a hawk was “flown” over the cage and its shadow cast on the rabbit below.
The discovery was made that a type of light-sensing cells were found in high concentration in the rabbit’s nape, just beneath the skull. This finding added to our store of knowledge about the ap¬ parent possession of the same sort of cells in the human body. Photosensitive cells were sensing the hawk shadow in the rab¬ bit. In the human, there was a strong possibility that the same sort of cell was highly concentrated in the hands. This would be the answer to such questions as how the hand was able to transmit impressions of temperature to the brain when exper¬ imenting with color samples. Color is dependent upon light. It is the strength and frequency of the energy radiating from the object that determines one color from another. When a color is touched, those sensitive cells might react to the difference in color and return a feeling of temperature to the hand. Research in psi involves borrowing and collecting bits of information from any branch of science to answer questions about how skills are performed. As a researcher in this field. I never knew when data essential to my investigations would be provided, nor from what source. A recent broadcast on the Discovery Channel involved the study of the mysterious duck-billed platypus in Australia. It was known that this animal was able to swim underwater w'ith its eyes and ears tightly closed, yet accurately and skillfully snap up a very small shrimp in its bill. It w-as known that neither tire eyes nor cars were being used in this search process, so something else had to be in opera¬ tion. That something else involved the discovery by the re¬ search team of a very specialized electrosensitive cell, which was in high concentration in the platypus’s bill. This cell en¬ ables the animal to seek out and accurately place weak elec¬ trical pulses from its prey and to capture it in its bill. What a miraculous finding! It was not found to support psi research, but an ordinary everyday finding of modern tech¬ nology as applied to an animal that has evolved over millions of years!
