You Can Practice ESP

Is ESP real?

Today virtually all informed people agree that it is.

It has been proved to the last decimal point of probability statistics that information is available to us through something other than the five senses.

It can be information from the past, the present, or the future. It can be from a point nearby or far away.

Neither time nor space nor Faraday cages are a barrier to what- ever “extrasensory” faculty is at work in ESP.

ESP stands for “extrasensory perception.” I do not like this terminology. “Extrasensory” means outside, apart from, our sensory apparatus. This seems to deny the existence of a sensory apparatus other than the five senses, though obviously one exists, since we do sense information without the use of them. There is nothing extrasensory at all about ESP.

The word “perception” is fine for the sort of experiments conducted by J. B. Rhine at Duke University, where percipients guessed the turn of special cards accurately enough to virtually rule out chance. However, in Mind Control we do not simply perceive, we actually project our awareness to where the desired information is. Perception is too passive a word for what we do.

Therefore in Mind Control we speak of “Effective Sensory Projection.” The initials are the same, and appropriately so, since we mean all that is generally understood by ESP and more.

To experience ESP, Mind Control students go through no card-guessing exercises. These aim at finding out if people are psychic. We already know they are and we therefore set ourselves a larger task—to train them to perform psychically with real life in ways so exciting that they experience a sort of spiritual “high” so exquisitely intense that their lives are never quite the same again. This comes at the end of about forty hours of instruction and exercises. We routinely and reliably train people to function psychically; we have done so with over a half-million graduates. By the time you have mastered all the techniques so far in this book, you will be well on your way to prac- ticing ESP. You will be able to enter deep levels of mind and remain fully conscious, and you will be able to visualize things and events almost with the fullness of five-senses reality. These are the two gateways to the psychic world. In Mind Control classes students are close to operat- ing psychically by the end of the second day, and on the third they actually do operate psychically—to pro- ject their awareness outside their bodies. They begin with a simple exercise in visual imagina- tion. In very deep meditation they project themselves in front of their own homes by imagining they are there. They carefully note everything they see before they enter by the front door to stand in their living room facing the south wall. They see this room at night with the lights on, then in the daytime with sunlight coming through the windows, and study every detail they can remember. Then they touch the south wall and enter it. This may sound outiandish to you, but it You Cm Practice ESP I 91 is perfectly natural to those who have gone through intensive training in visualization. Inside the wall they are where they have never been before, so they “test” their new environment by noting the light, the odors, the temperature, and, by knocking on the inside of the wall, the solidity of the materials. Outside the wall again and facing it, they change its color to black, red, green, blue, and violet, then return it to its original color. Next they hold up a chair— weightless in this dimension—and study it against the wall as they change its color again. They do this with a watermelon, a lemon, an orange, three bananas, three carrots, and a head of lettuce. When this session is completed, the first important step has been taken to put the logical mind in the back seat and the imaginative mind up front where the con- trols are. In the kind of exercises I am describing now, the logical mind tells the student, “No, don’t tell me you’re inside a wall or some other outiandish place. You know that can’t be; you’re sitting here.” But the imaginative mind, now strengthened by a series of visualization exercises, is able to ignore this. As the imagination grows even stronger, so do our psychic powers. It is the imaginative mind which holds them. During the next session the students mentally project themselves into cubes or cylinders of metal—stainless steel, copper, brass, and lead—where, as they did in- side the walk they test for fight, odor, color, tempera- ture, and solidity, all at a pace rapid enough to keep logic out of the way. Working their way up from the simple to the more complex arrangements of matter, they begin their pro- jection into living matter with a fruit tree. They ex- amine a fruit tree in all four seasons against a sequence92 of colors on their mental screens, then project into the leaves and the fruit Now for a giant step forward: projection into a p e t The students have been so successful up to this point that “Can I reaHy do this?” is a question that crosses very few minds. They confidently examine a pet from the outside against their mental screens, with colors changing; then, just as confidently, they mentally enter the skull and living brain. After a few minutes of recon- naissance inside the pet’s head, they emerge once again to examine him from the outside, this time focusing on the chest Now inside the chest to examine the rib cage, the spine, the heart, the lungs, the liver; then out again, now armed with points of refeaence for what will prob- ably be the most dumbfounding day of their lives, the fourth day, when they will work with humans. However, there is preparatory work to do beforehand. In an especially deep level of meditation, some- times well into Theta, Mind Control students—in their now well-trained imaginations—construct laboratories of whatever size, shape, and color they are comfortable with. These will include a desk and chair of their own design, a clock, a calendar containing all dates, past, present, and future, plus filing cabinets. Nothing un- usual so far. To understand the next step it is necessary to point out again how far our psychic sensing apparatus is from language and logic, how close it is to images and sym- bols. I point this out because the next step is to equip the laboratory with “instruments” for psychically cor- recting abnormalities detected in the humans who will be examined the following day. Most of these instru- ments are like nothing you have seen in any laboratory. They are highly instrumental symbols—symbolic instru- ments, if you will. Imagine a fine sieve for filtering impurities from You Can Practice ESP I 93 blood; a delicate brush to sweep away the white powder (calcium) that can be seen psychically in cases of arthritis; lotions for fast healing; baths for washing away guilt; a hi-fi set with special music for calming the distressed. Every student makes up his own ar- mamentarium; no two sets of tools are exactly alike.

They come from where all is possible, from deep levels of mind, and many graduates come to realize that the work they do with them has consequences in what we call the objective world.

As the student works with these tools, he may have need of some wise counsel to help in perplexing mo- ments—an inner “still small voice.” For the Mind Con- trol student, though, it is not a small voice but a strong one, and not one but two.

In his laboratory he evokes two counselors, a man and a woman.

He is told before he begins this meditative session that he will do this and, if he is like most other students, he will have a pretty firm idea of whom he wants as counselors. Rarely does he get his wish; al- most never is he disappointed.

One student, hoping to meet Albert Einstein, found instead a small man in clown’s paint, with a rose- colored Ping-Pong ball for a nose, and wearing a cap with a pinwheel. The little man turned out to be a reli- able source of practical advice.

Another student, Sam Merrill, who wrote an article about Mind Control in New Times (May 2, 1975), evoked two very real people as counselors, though their behavior was far removed from their real selves. In his laboratory, the submarine Nautilus, writes Merrill, “a little man in knickers and a silk shirt emerged from the decompression chamber.

He was slim, balding and gentle, doe-like eyes set in deep sockets. My counselor was William Shakespeare. I said ‘Hi’ but he didn’t answer.

" . . . a disembodied voice announced that we were going ashore, and Will and I leapt from a hatchway onto a deserted b e a c h . . . .

“On the beach, we met my second counselor, Sophia Loren. She had just returned from a swim and her cot- ton T-shirt clung lusciously to the goodies beneath. She too ignored me at first, but was overjoyed to meet Shakespeare.

The two shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, then fell to the sand, began thrashing, throb- bing, grunting, squealing

The next day, when it was time for the serious business of working cases, Mr. Merrill’s orientologist gave him the name of a sixty-two-year-old woman in Florida.

The two counselors, more interested in each other than the woman, playfully examined her and left to attend to more pressing matters.

Had the counselors left without giving counsel?

No—the woman’s abdomen had disappeared. “In its place,” wrote Merrill, “was a length of pink neon intestine that flashed angrily.” He learned from his orientologist that the woman was in the hospital with a seriously inflamed intestine—diverticulitis.

Counselors can be very real to Mind Control graduates. What are they? We are not sine—perhaps some figment of an archetypal imagination, perhaps an embodiment of the inner voice, perhaps something more.

What we do know is that, once we meet our counselors and learn to work with them, the association is respectful and priceless.

More than four centuries before Christ, the Greek philosopher Socrates had a counselor who, unlike our counselors in Mind Control, limited his advice to warnings. According to Plato, Socrates said, “I have, since my childhood, been attended by a semi-divine being whose voice from time to time dissuades me from some undertaking, but never directs me what I am to do.”

Another writer, Xenophon, quotes Socrates as saying, “up to now the voice has never been wrong.” As you will soon see, a Mind Control graduate, mentally in his laboratory, confidently consulting his coun- selors, is a person with an immense power to benefit himself and others. At this point in Mind Control train- ing, this is understood but not yet experienced.

The next day the air almost trembles with expectation.

Even our graduates who come back to us for a refresher feel it. So far, everything the student has ex- perienced has been apparent only to him, in the privacy of his own mind. Now comes the moment for performing so that everyone can see.

There are two mental exercises beforehand, both mental examinations of the body of a friend, pretty much as was done earlier with pets, but this time in more functional detail. With this completed, the students pair off.

One member of each pair is called the “psychorientologist,” and the other the “psychic operator.” (“Psy- chorientologist” is derived from “psychorientology,” a word I coined to describe everything we do in Mind Con- trol; it simply means orienting the mind.)

The psychorientologist writes on a card the name of a person he knows, his age, his general whereabouts, and a description of some major physical affliction.

The psychic operator, sometimes with the help of his psychorientologist, goes to his level, probably for the first and last time with shaky confidence in what he is about to do.

When he signals that he is ready—at his level, in his laboratory, in the presence of his counselors—the psy- chorientologist tells him the name, age, sex, and location of the person whose name is on the card. The psychic operator’s job is to find out what is wrong with this person he has never met and never heard of until96 this moment. He examines this person’s body, inside and out, in the orderly way his imagination has been trained to do, consulting with his counselors when necessary, perhaps “speaking” to the person himself. The psychic operator is urged by his psychorientologist to report findings as he goes along, to “keep talk- ing, even if you feel you’re guessing.”

Typically, a session would sound like this (the following is based on a real case):

Psychorientologist: “The name of the person I have listed here is John Summers. He is forty-eight years old, lives in Elkhart, Indiana. One, two, three—John Summers of Elkhart, Indiana, is now on your screen.

Sense it, feel it, visualize it, imagine it, create it, know he is there, take it for granted he is there. Scan the body with your intelligence from where you know the head to be to where you know the feet are, up and down, up and down, once a second.

“While scanning the body in this manner, allow your imagination to select the three areas of greatest attrac- tion. Maintain the rate of scanning at once a second and mention to me the areas of attraction as they come to you. You will feel as though you are making it up, so tell me everything that enters your mind.”

Psychic operator: “He carries his right shoulder a little lower, a little forward. . . . Everything else seems okay except maybe the left a n k l e . . . .

Let’s look inside the chest. . . . Everything’s warm . . . a little cooler on the right. . . cooler and darker. . . . His right lung is gone. . . . Now to that ankle. . . . Seems okay, just a little jagged white line there . . . hurts in damp weather . . . must have broken it sometime. . . . I guess that’s all. . . . Wait, my female counselor is turning the guy around for me, pointing to a spot behind his ears . . . yes, terribly deep scars there . . . he had a mastoid operation, very deep. . . . Okay, that’s all.” You Can Practice ESP I 97 Psychorientologist: “Very good. He is missing his right lung and there is a deep scar behind one ear. I have no information about the ankle. Now review the feelings you had when you told me about the right lung and the scar behind the ear. Review your feeling and use this as a point of reference next time you work a case.” After a moment’s pause the psychic returns to Beta, smiling. “Wow! That’s crazy!” Yes, it is crazy. It violates everything we have ex- perienced in this sane world. However, there is nothing unusual about this scene I have just described. Some miss a little on their first case, some miss altogether on the first, second, even third case; but as the day draws to an end, virtually everyone has scored enough direct hits to know it is not “just coincidence”—something very real is at work here.

Too often we think of the imagination as an irresponsible creator of nonsense. Often it is. But works of art are the products of trained imaginations; psychic results are also the product of imaginations trained in a very special way. The Mind Control student, when he functions psychically for the first time, feels that he is “just imagining’’ what he sees.

This is why the psychorientologist tells him to “keep talking, even if you feel you are just guessing.” If he were to stop talking, his logical mind might tempt him to start reasoning things out, stifling his psychic powers, just as it does in everyday life.

After his first direct hit, the Mind Control student knows he is not “just imagining.” He is imagining and learning to trust the first thing that comes to mind. This is his psychic gift coming through. What is at work are perfectly natural laws. Our minds are not confined to our heads; they reach out. To98 reach out effectively, they must be motivated by desire, fueled by belief, sparked by expectancy. On his first case the average student does not have high expectancy. If he is at all informed and open- minded he knows perfectly well there is such a thing as ESP, but his entire life’s training has “proved” to him that ESP is someone else’s ability, not his. Once he learns differently, once he scores his first hit, his ex- pectancy leaps and he is on his way. A few hours later, with eight or nine other good cases under his belt, he will be a Mind Control graduate.

‘Time and again I saw students correctly diagnosing the illness. ..

wrote Bill Starr of Midnight in his article “Mind Control Classes CAN Improve Your Mental Power” (November 19, 1973). In it he described a case he had once presented that he had thought would prove especially difficult to diagnose because neither he nor anyone else in the class knew what the illness was.

Earlier that day, a Mr. Thomas, a Mind Control graduate, had visited his son in the hospital. There was another patient in the room. Thomas learned nothing about him except his name.

Here is what the psychic found: The right leg was “sort of paralyzed,” the arms and shoulders were stiff, and some vertebrae in the back were fused because of a disease. In addition, the man had a sore throat and his intestines were inflamed. He was five and a half feet tall and weighed a hundred and five pounds.

Back at the hospital, Mr. Thomas learned that the patient had been a victim of polio in childhood.

He had fallen from a wheelchair and broken his right hip, and everything eke the Mind Control student said was correct, except for the sore throat and inflamed intestines.

Those were his son’s symptoms.

Often what appear to be misses turn out, like this one, to be hits on the wrong target With practice, the aim improves. With more practice, the psychic can connect with things as well as people.

Dick Mazza, an actor-singer in New York, supplements his income by typing book manuscripts for writers and publishers. One day he lost a manuscript and frantically called a Mind Control graduate to help him find it. He had it last, he said, when he entered a small church auditorium to rehearse a play. A group of young morticians were leaving; they were there for graduation exercises. The manuscript was in a white envelope with Dick’s name and address and the word “rush” written on it.

The Mind Control graduate has as one of his counselors an elderly mute woman whose usefulness is limited to yes and no nods and a sort of sign language.

The male counselor helps out as an interpreter and occasionally pitches in with his own advice.

The graduate visualized the manuscript as Dick described it He saw it in the middle of a stack of papers on a large, untidy desk.

“Is the manuscript safe there?” he asked his woman counselor. She nodded yes.

“Does one of the new morticians have it?”

No.

“Is the desk in the church?”

No.

“Will ft be returned soon?”

Yes.

“Who has it?”

She pointed at the graduate himself. “I have it?” he asked.

No.

The male counselor came to the rescue. “She means someone about your age has it. He asked a young wom- an to take his papers back to his office because he was going out to celebrate with his students. It’s on his desk.100 Don’t worry, when he sees it, he’ll send it along to Dick.”

Two days later the dean of the morticians’ school telephoned Dick. After the graduation, he explained, he had picked up a stack of his papers that somehow included the manuscript and asked his secretary to put them on his desk because he was going out to have a few drinks with the new graduates.

It has occurred to many that in our case work we are dealing with nothing more than thought transference. (Nothing more! How sophisticated some folks are!)

The case I used as an example—the one of the man with the missing lung—is a real one. You will recall there was one apparent miss, the broken ankle.

The orientologist could confirm (he had written them down beforehand) the mastoid operation and the missing lung. But all he could say about the broken ankle was “I have no information about t h a t " Later the person whose case was being worked confirmed that in fact he had broken his ankle years before, and that it causes him some discomfort in damp weather.

Thought transference? Not as we normally understand the term; the thought was not in the mind of the orientologist for he knew nothing about the broken ankle. Nor was it likely to have been in the mind of the “case” at that moment.

But yon may object it just might have been in his mind.

Yes, it just might have been. Another case: A student doing case work reported that a woman had a scar on her elbow from a fracture.

The orientologist had no information about it and checked with the woman, who said no, she had never injured her elbow. Then a few days later the woman mentioned it to her mother.

She had broken her elbow when she was 3 years old! Is this thought transference?

The psychic energy which people send out is strongest when their survival is at stake. This is why so many cases of spontaneous ESP involve accidents and sudden death.

It is for this reason that our final exercise is case work with severely ill people. The graduate who conscientiously practices his case work learns to pick up weaker and weaker psychic signals until one day he is able psychically to connect with anyone he has in mind, whether or not the person is in trouble. With practice we become more and more sensitive.

In my early experiments I learned that children demonstrate psychic ability more readily than adults do.

They are far less limited by Beta’s view of what is possible, and their sense of reality has not developed to the point where they will say only those things that seem logical.

One experiment, just after the basics of the Mind Control course were developed, was designed to work out the structure of the case-working sessions I have described. As you will see, my earlier technique was quite different from what it is today.

Two children, Jimmy and Timmy, had been trained in the basics. I separated them, putting each in a different room, each with an experimenter, a sort of forerunner of today’s psychorientologist.

One child, Jimmy, was asked to go to his level and create something, anything, in his imagination. Meanwhile Timmy, in the other room, went to his level and was asked to find out what Jimmy was up to. Jimmy said to his experimenter, “I’m making a little truck. It has a green body and red wheels.”

Timmy’s experimenter asked, “What is Jimmy doing now?”

“Oh, he’s making a little toy truck.”

“Well, describe i t "

“Oh, it has a green body and red wheels.”

This is case work at a more subde level than we conduct with adults in our classes. It takes practice to “become as little children.”