Psychic Exploration

Since the advent of Spiritualism over a century ago in America, certain individuals with unusual psychic abilities have dominated the scene of psychic research. This essay, chapter 2 from Psychic Exploration, describes famous Western "sensitives," or those who can sense various paranormal activity.

Precognition is the hardest aspect of parapsychology for us to understand yet the easiest to experience and to test scientifically in the laboratory. Retrocognition occurs but is reported much more rarely. Hundreds of studies have been made of spontaneous precognition experiences and of controlled experiments in the laboratory. The use of modern electronic instruments has confirmed this. Even dreams have been shown to come true in the laboratory. This essay, chapter 6 from Psychic Exploration, studies precognition and retrocognition.

During the last four decades, careful laboratory work has shown that man can, to a certain degree, influence the outside world by pure thought. This process is called psychokinesis (PK). This essay, chapter 7 from Psychic Exploration, delves into this very subject.

This essay, chapter 8 of Psychic Exploration, surveys the area of research and resources in parapsychology today.

Modern research demonstrates that plants react to human thoughts and feelings. This essay, chapter 12 of Psychic Exploration, gives the first simple steps in showing that thoughts and emotions are energetic and that this energy can be measured by the biosystem of a plant coupled to a Wheatstone bridge amplifier.

Since 1861, more than two dozen persons in several countries have claimed to obtain on photographic plates and film a variety of types of images that could only have been produced paranormally. This essay, chapter 13 of Psychic Exploration, delves into psychic photography and thoughtography.

When we ask whether consciousness continues after death, we usually assume that a surviving self will exist in some kind of body and will include the personality familiar from waking experience. Since the consciousness that may continue after death presumably exists before, we may explore it in the living. This essay, chapter 17 of Psychic Exploration, studies the problems and possibilities of survival research.

Success in the formal scientific investigation of phenomena has always required that man learn to speak formally about the phenomena under investigation. Psychic phenomena are considered in terms of the unresolved problem of the relation between mind and matter, with paraphysics being defined as the physics of paranormal processes. This essay, chapter 19 of Psychic Exploration, explores why modern science has been unable to deal with highly complex systems and has therefore been able to address only certain kinds of problems.

This essay, chapter 20 of Psychic Exploration, is an anecdotal account of a personal voyage to the Soviet Union (Moscow, Leningrad, Alma-Ata) to investigate Russian research in telepathy, skin vision, psychokinesis, acupuncture, Kirlian photography, and psychic healing.

Mysticism and the paranormal have long been associated in two ways: in the repeated reports of mystically trained individuals acquiring paranormal abilities and in the warnings given in all serious mystical training schools that students who become interested in these abilities will cease to make progress. This essay, chapter 24 of Psychic Exploration, discusses those associations.