When I was growing up, there was a fantastic show on our PBS station called “Connections” by James Burke. He would begin the show with the unlikely connections one thing had with another such as what chimneys had to do with romantic love. He would methodically chain the degrees of separation from the one to the other. This is what Mitch Horowitz has done with “The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality” between the New Age movement and psychic ability. What connects the two is positive intention and how it works is still a matter of conjecture.
J.B. Rhine studied psychic ability, calling it Extrasensory Perception, for decades and wrote about something he called the decline effect. Eventually, those he tested would get pretty bored trying to guess which card was next in the pile causing their once-positive results to fade. It’s like a tired baseball pitcher starting to throw home runs. If the baseball coach knows precisely when to pull the pitcher, they won’t give up a base to the opposition. Knowing when this decline effect occurs can prevent negative data from skewing the positive results the researcher has obtained thus far. Skeptics include the tests where decline effect has occurred to show that there is no statistical effect at all.
Helmut Schmidt found that his subjects testing for psychokinesis fared much better when he recognized how psychic ability truly manifests in people: “it is neither egalitarian nor available on-demand”. He chose to study subjects who already showed promise in the psychic arena rather than study a pool of unknown subjects who might, once again, skew the results to the negative. Here comes the baseball analogy again: If a beginner picks up a bat, they might hit a nice soft pitch to the infield if they hit the ball at all. Every once in a while, that beginner will get lucky and hit a home run. An aspiring baseball player might spend years of hard work and still not get 200 hits out of a thousand pitched balls. Then there is the one amazing hitter who gets above 400 hits out of a thousand. I promise you those remarkable baseball players have some sort of mental ritual they go through to succeed while they’re at bat.
Schmidt also recognized that even the talented psychic needed to be comfortable in their surroundings to have the greatest psychokinetic outcomes. He would come to their homes with a random number generator and wait until they were “psyched” for the test. He was patient and upbeat with everyone and his results showed positive hits well above the average. Those scientists who attempted to replicate his results fared far worse. Why? They didn’t understand that psychic ability is mercurial and techy. They put subjects in uncomfortable labs and gave them no incentive for success, just a few dollars for participation. That’s like giving every little leaguer a trophy because they showed up to games.
In “The Miracle Club” Horowitz spends several chapters discussing, in detail, how to reach a desired goal. He explains the methods of Émile Coué (a psychologist who used autosuggestion for psychotherapy), and Neville Goddard (who used autosuggestion to make things happen in his life) which correlate quite nicely with the methods employed by successful psychics. I had participated in an experiment at the Rhine Research Center testing whether a meditative state would increase my psychic ability. We spent a couple of hours a week learning autosuggestion during meditation to obtain a goal (one of our choosing). We were tested in the ganzfeld room before we were taught this method and then again soon thereafter. Up to that point, I had been using a form of Transcendental meditation that I had learned from taking Aikido classes, but this one was more focused and intentional. This type of meditation is shallower and does not involve completely clearing one’s mind of all thoughts, rather it allows to focus on a desired effect in a very relaxed state like when you start to fall asleep (hypnagogic state).
Another method of focused intention is taught by Bill Bengston called Image Cycling. The practitioner chooses twenty goals each with an associated symbol. For instance, if you’d like a particular car, you would write it up in a journal and then picture a steering wheel. The cycling begins slowly at first and then speeds up significantly until you are visualizing all twenty icons in less than a second. Bill claims that this gets the practitioner into a receptive state. His method is currently used as a psychic healing technique; however, those healing practitioners also get something off their list. My friend Susan got the car she wanted and had to replace that desire with another in her journal. Basically, it’s a win/win for both the healing practitioner and the patient.
Positive visualizations require two things. First, the imagined scene needs to be a completed task. For instance, if you want to get a certain number on the dice, you visualize the dice being thrown and ending on that number. If you want that job, you must see the supervisor shaking your hand. It’s not enough just to see these things, you must feel the handshake or hear the sounds of a casino when the dice falls. It’s like a total immersion fantasy that you believe with all your heart will come true. Secondly, the mind needs to be in a receptive state. Goddard and Coué both employed the hypnagogic state to employ their statement of intent. It also works when just waking up, during intentional meditation, or using Bengston’s image cycle.
No one knows how this works, though Horowitz does describe some possible hypotheses in the book, mostly having to do with quantum mechanics. I have a different hypothesis which several physicists (the number continues to grow) like Max Planck also consider as necessary to any physics equation, that of consciousness. If consciousness permeates all things, all things can be manipulated and our reality is not as fixed as we might believe. Back a decade or so ago, I enjoyed playing MMORPGs like Everquest. I had an avatar in the game that I manipulated to do my bidding. The software engineers made that place a reality for my avatar and they manipulated her reality while I took her places I wanted her to go. I think of life on planet Earth as avatars that consciousness inhabits in a reality that it programmed. With practice, we can manipulate that reality just a bit.
