Is E.S.P real?

Scientists tend to have a skeptical view of ESP and parapsychology.There seems to be a lot of room for fraud when it comes to ESP. Because of this people are naturally skeptical. Does this mean that ESP and the researchers investigating this phenomenon arrant doing valid research? Surprisingly there is research indicating that there is something to ESP.

When most people think of parapsychologists researching ESP they automatically think of ESP testing cards. J.B Rhine who is some times refereed to the father of parapsychology created these cards. His career in parapsychology began at Duke University in the late 1920s. Rhine became interested in ESP after hearing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speak about ESP and spiritualism in the early 1920s. He began having children guess numbers that were stamped on cards. Not getting the results he wanted Rhine asked a college Karl Zener a specialist in perception to design a set of cards that could be easily remembered. The cards consisted of 5 symbols the subjects were to guess which symbol was on the card. They ran four separate experiments. The results were 558 hits out of 1,850 trails. Chance would account for 370 hits making the odds 22 billion -to- one. (Broughton, 66-70)

ESP research was taken even further at the Maimonides medical center in Brooklyn New York. The studies at Maimonides took place in the mid 1960s. The experiments mainly focused on ESP and dreams. The mainmonides lab discounted Rhine's card guessing tests and started a new approach. They preferred a more free approach compared with the forced guessing method of the cards. What they did was have one person sleeping and one person mentally send a picture that was sealed in an envelope. The two people would be separated in two different rooms. The dreamer was hooked up to a polygraph machine. When the dreamer reached the REM state indicating the dreamer had started to dream. When the dreamer entered this state a buzzer would sound in the room were the sender was in. The sender would look at a picture and try to send it to the dreaming person. When the REM state stopped the person who was dreaming would be woken up, asked what they were dreaming about, and recorded. This routine would go on through out the time. They would usually get around four dreams. The nightly dreams would then be sealed up and sent to be transcribed. The transcriptions would then be sent to outside judges who would rank the nightly transcripts against the possible target pictures. The judges did not know which picture had been used in the session. They would rank each transcript according to the similarity to picture. The best rank a picture would get would be a one, indicating a direct hit. One example of this is the man doing the dreaming was dreaming of New Mexico, mountains, clouds, and Pueblo Indians going down into a Mayan-Aztec civilization. The target picture was Zapatistas by Carlos Oscar Romero. The picture was of Mexican Indians marching. There are mountains and clouds in the background. The judges labeled this as a striking hit. (Broughton 89-92)

The most recent studies around ESP actually came from interestingly enough the United States government. The United States government became interested in ESP in the early 1960s. An article in a French magazine called Science and Life called "The Secret of the Nautilus" would start a psychic cold war. The article reported that the US government did a secret test that involved using telepathy to communicate with a submarine submerged under an Arctic ice cap. The story turned out not to be true but the soviets took the article very seriously. The soviets began heavily funding research experiments. By the late 1960s the US government saw how much the soviets were spending began looking into researching ESP them selves. This research came to be known as remote viewing. (Schnabel 90-92)

Remote viewing essentially is a scientific term for clairvoyance. It is defined as the ability of experienced or inexperienced to view, by means of mental processes, remote geographical or technical targets such as roads, buildings, and laboratory apparatus. (Targ and Puthoff ix) Put more simply it could be defined as the ability to perceive remote locations while not being there physically. Remote viewing experiments started in early 1970s at Stanford Research Institute.

Remote viewing first happened as sort of an accident. Shortly after getting the CIA contract Puthoff hired a man named Russell Targ. Like Puthoff Targ was also a laser physicist. Targ created an ESP training machine. The machine consisted of a computer that had light bulbs behind four slides. The computer would randomly light up a slide and the subject using this was to guess which slide would light up. Ingo Swann didn't like this machine. It reminded him of the earlier forced choice work in parapsychology. One day Swann suggested that Puthoff and Targ give him geological coordinates and he would describe what he saw. Puthoff and Targ didn't like this mainly because if Swann did get accurate information skeptics would ague that he had a photographic memory. Ingo would not let this go after threatening to quit Puthoff and Targ finally gave in. After trying this a few times they decided to do some more research in this area after Swann successfully described the coordinates. (Schnabel 98-104) This procedure evolved into the remote viewer or psychic and a monitor in a sound proofed room that was shielded from electromagnetic waves. The monitor's job is to ask questions and talk to and the remote viewer. Neither of them have any idea what the target location is. Then one or two people in another room with roll a die and pick up a manila envelope correlating with the number that was rolled on the die. They would open the envelope and a location is in side it. The people them go to the location for about a half-hour and then come back. The people that do this are called out-bounders. (McMoneagle 44-45)

There is now solid evidence that ESP is very much real. If this is the case, we must change the way we think about reality. Most scientists today believe that ESP is impossible because it violates certain natural laws such as time and space. There is however a theory that explains this: the field consciousness theory. This theory has been around for years in which Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious and it has also been referred to as global mind. The basic premise of the field consciousness theory is that mind and matter are radically interconnected.

Despite almost 30 years of solid research with significant statistical data, the debate over ESP is still on going. Part of the problem is with "main stream" sciences belief systems. The belief system acts as a filter to what people will or will not accept. It is similar to not being able to find an object you are looking for that is right in front of your face. They will not validate ESP research simply because they do not believe in it. Scientific discoveries usually go in three stages: the first being disbelief and conflict Laws of Science; the second being admitting there is weak evidence therefore it is unimportant; and the final stage is acceptance where the main stream accepts that there is credible evidence. ESP research is now in stage two. Science has now admitted that there is weak evidence that supports the ESP phenomena. This however, is not true: ESP has been proven over and over beyond a reasonable doubt. Statistical analysis has proven that there is concrete evidence that ESP does in fact exist. Just because mainstream scientists will not validate it, does not make the evidence less credible or make the scientists correct. As in the 1400s there was a consensus with scientists that the world was flat and anyone who did not subscribe to this theory was ridiculed much like today with ESP research. As scientists slowly realized that this school of thought was false and that the world is in fact round. One day scientists will realize the validity of ESP research. (Kris Stretton Mondovista)