What is the First Sight
model?
Clinical psychologist and parapsychologist James Carpenter,
Ph.D. has recently published his magnum opus “First sight: ESP and parapsychology in everyday
life.” It may very well turn out to be
the turning point in a profound paradigm shift that moves psi from its
reputation as anomalous, skittish in the lab, and rare to normal, robust, and
ubiquitous.
This is an incredibly impressive, rigorous, scholarly piece
of work that integrates a lifetime’s encyclopedic familiarity with
parapsychology, clinical psychology, and general psychology.
The name for the model is a play on the colloquial term
“second sight” historically used to describe inherited psychic ability. Carpenter’s theory turns the colloquial
assumptions on their head and proposes that psi is not an ability, it is not
inherited, and it is going on all the time unconsciously without any sensory
input. Instead, we are continually
existing and transacting in an extended, nonlocal universe in a way that
extends beyond our physical boundaries, so it is “first sight” (Carpenter,
2012, pp. 8, 13, 18).
Carpenter’s model proposes that psi is analogous to
subliminal perception. Subliminal
perception has been very well substantiated by experimental psychology and by
clinical observation. We have an
unconscious level of functioning that goes on all the time, integrates sensory
data, handles automatic activities, and feeds information to our conscious
level based on what is most salient to us at the time. Carpenter’s innovation is to say that psi
behaves analogously. It is unconscious,
going on all the time, integrates non-sensory data, contributes to the handling
of automatic activities, and also feeds information to our conscious
level. In the case of PK, it manifests
as unconsciously-driven behavior.
As a normal, ongoing, unconscious way of being in the world,
psi undergirds all psychological functioning for all people all the time. Therefore, it is not an ability or gift or
character trait that only some possess, nor is it anomalous. It is aggregating into our other normal,
unconscious processes constantly. For
Carpenter, what’s unusual about it is that we sometimes consciously see the
effects of it, such as when we have an experience of ESP or PK. Most of the time, it operates unconsciously,
shaping our choices and way of being in the world.
People who appear to be more psychic can more accurately be
said to have more “control over the expression of psi and some skill in
understanding and using these expressions” (Carpenter, 2012, p. 315). These people tend to be interested in psi
and in subliminal processes in general, and to cultivate them. They tend to be less anxious, more
adventurous, believe more is possible, tolerate ambiguity, and have very
aligned, unconflicted healthy entitlement to being efficacious in the world.
There are many more corollaries to his theory. These are just the highlights.
Extending the model to
neuro-damage-induced, abrupt psi openings, where psi is initially camouflaged
How might we extend this model to understand what happens
when neurological damage triggers a discontinuous increase in psi? Specifically, we will focus on people who
have a neurological incident, followed by indications of an abrupt psi opening,
but who take awhile to learn how to interpret the phenomena they are
experiencing. This experience of the
psi being initially camouflaged as something else is much more common than the
instances of neurological incident leading immediately to a huge increase in
accessible, clear-as-day psi, such as in the case of Peter Hurkos.
Some people have been using psi extensively since
childhood. Some people have relatively
gentle and satisfying psi openings in adulthood. Today, we are going to focus on psi openings that originate in a
form of neurological trauma, are unprepared for, and are highly distressing and
confusing. In this type of situation,
it’s often not clear what’s psi, what’s a symptom of trauma or healing, or how
to interpret either. Also, much
potential psi gets overlooked because of the general chaos.
This extension of the First Sight model will also be
relevant for other abrupt, yet camouflaged, psi openings stemming from other
causes such as NDEs, other spiritually transformative experiences, illnesses
and trauma.
Carpenter refers briefly to the connection between brain
damage and psi. He suggests that it is
the prolonged disorientation, confusion, cognitive uncertainty and possibly
passive acceptance of brain damage that may facilitate the bringing to
consciousness of the normally unconscious, ongoing psi interface between the
individual and the universe (Carpenter, 2012, p. 71).
We are going to expand on this; look closely at the
relationship of fear to psi; follow his example of using analogies from other
fields of psychology to look at the question of unconscious v conscious psi;
and propose a strategy to facilitate neurological healing and psychic development.
Fear, psi, and abrupt
openings
Fear is such a big part of this kind of experience. So let’s start with what Carpenter’s First
Sight model has to say about fear and psi, and then add a few other
observations specific to neurological damage from psychotropic medication and
distressing psi openings.
i. Carpenter’s collation
Carpenter has collated dozens of research studies that have
bearing on the relationship between anxiety and psi, and he generates several
over-arching observations. We will
focus on three main points here – 1) anxiety can be a feature of any one of
three constituents of a situation, 2) anxiety tends to interfere with psi, and
3) anxiety may explain psi-missing.
In trying to understand the role of anxiety in experiencing
psi, it is useful to consider three ways that anxiety can enter into any given
situation – the person may be fearful, the thing being perceived may be
fearsome, and/or the context, itself, may be stressful. All of these factors will influence the
person’s ability to process psi (Carpenter, 2012, p. 189).
Anxiety tends to decrease conscious psi, but increase
unconscious psi. Fear affects the
mind’s unconscious use of extrasensory information the same way it affects
unconscious usage of subliminal, sensory information. Although unconscious
attention orients rapidly to threat, “anxiety reliably hampers the effort to
bring preconscious information quickly, completely, and accurately to conscious
awareness” (Carpenter, 2012, p. 241).
And, to combine these first two points, Carpenter
states: “Anxiety must be low enough to
be manageable, whether the anxiety is about psi itself, the information
involved, other aspects of the situation at the moment, or some more general
state” in order for psi to be a useful resource (Carpenter, 2012, p.316).
Lastly, anxiety may explain psi missing. Psi missing is when a person misses the
target more than could be accounted for by chance. In other words, something non-random is going on; they are
demonstrating an unconscious, negative use of psi to *not* hit the target. Carpenter attributes this to two things – in
an anxious state, our focus of attention narrows to managing our anxiety. We are less open to the infinite array of
information out there. And, also if the material is seen as fearsome, it is
likely to be perceived unconsciously, but avoided consciously (Carpenter, 2012,
p. 66).
He refines this generalization later in greater detail,
taking into account the existence of different defensive styles (Carpenter,
2012, pp.229-241). One observation
particularly relevant to our topic is cited from the work of De Graaf and
Houtkooper (2004). They found that
people with more trauma history demonstrated *displaced* psi. In other words, they avoid the assigned
target (psi miss), but they accurately fixate on a nearby target – say the one
in the previous or following test (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 229-230). This is a fascinating glimpse of the
unconscious, suggesting a combination of hypervigilance and avoidance.
ii. Neurological damage from psychotropic medication
One type of neurological incident that occurs is the
withdrawal and recovery from psychotropic medications. Chronic, intense fear is a common symptom of
this syndrome. The nervous system has
been altered by exposure to the medications, and it is deeply unbalanced for a
long time until neurogenesis finally re-creates equilibrium. So, in a simple way, the anxiety is a
symptom of neurological damage.
In addition, this sometimes very long-lasting recovery
syndrome can be seen as a toxin-induced Kundalini rising. As such, the process of healing the damage
may also re-activate very early developmental stages in order to heal any
psychological or physical harm in the individual’s past. Like Grof’s holotropic breathwork, it may
even go back to perinatal experience.
So, in this way, the anxiety may be a symptom of deep working through or
Kundalini clearing blockages.
Also, those of us who have stumbled into this syndrome are
going through a shockingly unexpected, severe, chronic illness. This is anxiety-provoking, and we will each
deal with it in our characteristic, pre-existing personality / defensive
style. So, in this way, anxiety is a reaction
to a current stressor.
However, in addition to all these real sources of anxiety,
the pervasive anxiety may also a reaction to a psi opening which has been
triggered. The evidence for this is
that many people report an uptick in psi experiences and report the overall
sense of being relentlessly in the kind of altered state that is
psi-conducive. However, this putative
psi opening is a chaotic, elusive one.
One of the ways that Carpenter’s observations about First
Sight theory and fear may illuminate this situation is that there may be a big
increase in unconscious psi, but only a small increase in conscious psi. One other person in recovery who I know of
and I have shown unusually high waking delta on an EEG, which the neurofeedback
and meditation expert Anna Wise has interpreted as a primal tracking beacon and
a major component of intuition.
“Though usually thought of as the brainwaves of deep sleep,
in a waking state delta waves are often referred to as the orienting
response….On the very deepest level, they are our beacon that senses danger and
safety. They serve as our automatic
tracking device, our scanning function….This very primal, almost animalistic
response can be fine-tuned to sense emotions, needs, and attitudes in other
people.
“I like to call delta a kind of radar. As such, these brainwaves are a major component
of our intuition and empathy….These very slow, low-frequency brainwaves are
also present during most experiences of psychic phenomena and ESP” (Wise, 2004,
p. 198).
This jibes nicely with Carpenter in a couple of ways. Like Carpenter, Wise also posits an ongoing,
unconscious level of psi. And the fact
that two of us with this neurological syndrome are having so much waking delta,
but only sporadic psi experiences, and plenty of anxiety fits suggestively with
the general rule that anxiety may increase unconscious psi, but decrease
conscious psi.
Let us now apply to this particular neurological syndrome /
psi opening Carpenter’s organizing idea that the potential source of anxiety in
any situation is either in the person, in the stimulus, or in the context.
There is anxiety in the person. In this neurological syndrome, autonomic
arousal goes through the roof, cortisol levels are constantly high, with
adrenal overactivity, depopulation of serotonin and dopamine receptors, and a
generally dysregulated and over-reactive neuroendocrinological system. Several studies by parapsychologist Dean
Radin and others suggest that presentiment or anticipatory physiological
arousal is strongest when the stimulus is more aversive and when the person is
especially vulnerable to a stress response (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 200-202). It is an open question as to how much of the
autonomic arousal of this syndrome is a symptom of brain damage and how much is
a symptom of unfamiliar psi.
There is anxiety in the context. This is not an intentional psi opening, and
it comes at a time of illness. To the
extent that there is new, conscious psi, it may be anxiety-provoking because of
its implications. It is a momentous
paradigm shift to discover that we are more connected all the time than we
thought, and that we have more ability and power than we thought. The conscious psi that people seem to be
experiencing is sporadic and inchoate, yet there are some indications of
unconscious psi. Psi missing might be
part of the explanation for what is going on.
Carpenter found considerable support for the theory that anxiety can
lead to psi missing.
Furthermore, the particular form of psi missing that De
Graaf and Houtkooper (2004) found, where people displace psi and avoid the
target but accurately fixate on a nearby target (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 229-230)
may explain, in part, the common symptom in psych med neuro recovery of OCD or
obsessive rumination. Of course, these
symptoms may be thought of as purely signs of neurological damage, or as
psychological attempts to cope with neurological damage, but it may be that
they are also driven by an unconscious need to psi miss.
There may be anxiety in the stimulus. It seems likely that there is some bias in
what we unconsciously target during this syndrome / opening. There are many factors conspiring to cause
this – this was not a voluntary, planned developmental step; we are unprepared;
there is bona fide neurological damage; Kundalini may be exacerbating old hurts
as it repairs the system; and the morphic field or energy pattern of these
medications may predispose one to pick up on a darker part of the collective
unconscious. (Anecdotally, several
alternative healers and psychics have said that they can’t tolerate or
interpret the energy of someone on Paxil (Paroxetine)and that is very
abrasive).
One piece of evidence for this is that people in recovery
from antidepressants often report spontaneous, hypnagogic, closed eye visuals
of faces that are very sharply focused and specific. This is something they do not recall experiencing before
withdrawal from the medication. In
early recovery, the faces tend to be emotionally darker – angry, startled, even
grotesque. Often, as recovery
progresses, people report a shift to faces that are curious, friendly, smiling.
It is certainly possible that these visions are solely the
product of psychoneurological distress, however, it is noteworthy that they are
more sharply focused than other mental images or dreams that we experienced
before exposure to drugs and after.
Another possibility is that we are spontaneously connecting with other
people, who could be drawn from somewhere in the contemporary world, or the
past, the future, etc.
Carpenter cited one study that might support the theory that
we are initially skewed in the direction of picking up more threatening
material from the infinite options out there. “Gray et al. (2009) showed that subliminal presentations of
frightening material induced a heightened tendency to quickly perceive angry
rather than neutral faces (but only for people who were high in vulnerability
to anxiety)” (Carpenter, 2012, p. 208).
Are we spontaneously tuning in to the collective unconscious
like parapsychologist Roger Nelson’s REGs dotted around the world in the Global
Consciousness Project, but due to the toxin- and damage-driven nature of the
psi opening, we home in on whatever threatening material out there jibes with
our own psychoneurological profile?
Many people also report hearing music in early
recovery. These are people who have
never heard music before. And, again,
there can be a skew to the ominous. I
heard very threatening, specific, minor chord symphonic music for several months
in 2004, after an episode of moderate serotonin syndrome. Recovery from medication-induced
neurological damage is very much like a bad LSD trip – initially acute, then
attenuating -- where the doors of perception may be more open but you’re either
picking up only on the negative half of reality or you’re negatively
misinterpreting everything.
How can we help people who are going through a neurological
damage-induced, abrupt psi opening, where there is a lot of fear, and the psi
is coming to consciousness in a sporadic, confused, and skewed way? One approach would be to help people to make
the spontaneously occurring psi more conscious, and to interpret it more
accurately. Let us look at the issue of
unconscious v. conscious psi.
Unconscious v. conscious psi
and “the return of the repressed”
Carpenter proposes in the First Sight model that psi is a
continuous, unconscious engagement with the world beyond our senses that
informs our every thought, feeling, and behavior. He uses the concepts of subliminal perception, unconscious
process, and defense mechanisms from perceptual, cognitive, and clinical
psychology (including phenomenological, existential, and psychoanalytic
orientations) to explain unconscious psi.
I’m going to extend his First Sight Model to address the
experience of neurological damage-induced psi openings by using psychoanalytic
psychology. In order to do this, I’m
going to extend the model’s correct emphasis on continuous, unconscious psi to
encompass conscious psi as well. I
think that people going through this kind of distressing, chaotic psi opening
are experiencing “the return of the repressed’, and would benefit from help to
make their psi more conscious.
Carpenter has developed a brilliant model, which makes
excellent sense to me. However, I would
extend it in just this one way.
Unconsciousness and consciousness are polarities on a continuum, with
infinite gradations. Psi is continuous
and unconscious, but it also can be sometimes conscious. And we need to make it more conscious for
people who are being buffeted unconsciously by it.
For Carpenter, it is a major tenet of his model that psi can
be only unconscious (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 76, 89), therefore let me take a
moment to defend my belief that psi can be conscious as well.
Carpenter focuses on situations where it seems very
legitimate to say that people are only noticing the clues left by unconscious
psi, such as when they interpret fragments of their own free association and
espy an instance of clairvoyance, or when they notice ex post facto that a
dream held a vague precognitive reference to something that happened in the day
after the dream. But, this does not
cover the full range of psi experiences that people have.
People have macro-psi experiences ranging from intentional
energy healing that yields immediate, tangible results through “crisis
apparitions” where the vivid image of a person in mortal danger appears to a
distant loved one at the exact moment of the crisis to cases like that of
Eileen Garrett and the zeppelin accident where she had multiple precognitive
visions and synchronicities.
The accomplished British medium Eileen Garrett saw a
distinct and vivid image of a zeppelin over peacetime London in 1926, 1928, and
1929. Each time she saw it, it was in
progressively worse condition due to fire.
It was also a design that had not been made public yet. Once the new design and the plan for a
flight to India were publicly announced, she began to meet people who were
scheduled to be on that flight. She did
pass on a warning. The flight did end
in flames and 48 deaths. Later, she learned
that another medium had also passed along a message from a recently deceased
military man who tried to warn his friend, the navigator of the flight (pp
210-13).
Just as Carpenter has so aptly used analogies from other
fields of psychology to illuminate unconscious psi, so can we use analogies
from psychoanalytic psychology to show that psi exists on a consciousness
gradient. Just as sensory perceptions
and memories can be repressed or return from the repressed or be sort of
repressed, so it is with psi.
Sometimes, the unconscious comes barreling through to
consciousness like a freight train. A
classic example would be the spontaneous recall of childhood sexual abuse that
had been forgotten for several decades.
There can be also the spontaneous recall of something wonderful that has
been forgotten for several decades.
Contrariwise, things that have been consciously experienced can be
repressed.
A lovely example of someone experiencing conscious psi and
then repressing it and then unrepressing it can be found in psychoanalyst
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer’s account of having a paradigm-cracking experience with a
dowser, and only then unrepressing the memory that she, herself, had once found
an intentionally-hidden wristwatch in a closet by non-sensory means. She had completely forgotten that she had
done that. Because of this incident of
spontaneous recall, she proposed that many of us forget a lot of psi phenomena
because to remember it would rupture our whole worldview (Mayer, 2007, pp.
58-59).
Freud created the construct “the return of the repressed,”
and explained that wishes, fears, memories, and thoughts that a person cannot
accept are repressed into the unconscious.
Yet, they never go away, and they continuously seek to reveal
themselves, because they are important to the health of the individual. They are inconvenient truths. Sometimes, they emerge in partial,
disguised, distorted forms that allow for some expression or relief of
unconscious pressure, while still safeguarding the person from the consequences
of full awareness. These forms are
sometimes uncomfortable psychological and physical symptoms, which can drive a
person to seek help. The psychoanalytic
therapist provides support for the process of making the unconscious conscious,
and the symptoms become unnecessary. (http://www.answers.com/topic/return-of-the-repressed).
So, here we have psychoanalytic descriptions of how the
conscious can become unconscious and vice versa. The earliest psychoanalytic theorists thought in terms of a more
clear-cut topographical map of the psyche with an unconscious, preconscious,
and conscious. Later analytic thinkers
have proposed a less black-and-white view.
In the essay “Knowing and not knowing: A clinical example,” the 20th c.
psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott presented a short anecdote that illustrated the
paradoxical phenomenon of unrepressing something, knowing that one has
unrepressed heretofore forgotten information, yet also feeling that somehow one
has known it all along (Winnicott, 1989, pp. 24-25).
Contemporary psychology professor Matthew Erdelyi sees
unconscious and conscious knowing as polarities, not categories.
“Erdelyi (2001, 2006) further believes that the claim that repression
is unconscious and suppression is conscious is based on an outmoded and
erroneous conception of mentality.
Rather than proposing a categorical distinction between consciousness
and unconscious, he refers rather to an “unconscious-conscious continuum”
(Erdelyi, 2006, p. 513), comparing the distinction between conscious and
unconscious with the arbitrary “child-adult”distinction: ‘It does seem clear
that our popular distinctions—conscious-unconscious, explicit-implicit,
supraliminal-subliminal—are polar rather than categorical. They are
more-or-less . . .’ (Erdelyi, 2004, p. 88)” (Boag, 2010, p. 169).
Psychologists in other fields have also contributed to the
view of consciousness as a gradient.
Social cognition psychologist Alain Morin and developmental psychologist
Philippe Rochat have written about self-awareness. Morin (2006) compared and integrated several recent models that
are predicated on there being various levels of consciousness, and Rochat presented
a very interesting model suggesting that adult self-awareness is a “dynamic
flux between basic levels of consciousness that develop chronologically early
in life” (Rochat, 2003, p. 717).
The First Sight model makes a vitally important contribution
to our understanding by proposing that unconscious psi is operating absolutely
all the time, and that it is a substrate of all human experience. This fits quite nicely with all the other
processes that psychoanalytic theory claims are operating unconsciously all the
time, but which can, under the right conditions, be brought to
consciousness. And, just as
psychoanalytic theory assumes that part of the reason things are kept
unconscious is that they are threatening in some way, so we will assume that
part of the reason psi is kept unconscious is that it is threatening in some
way. (It is also true that part of the
reason things are kept unconscious is that they are being held as procedural
knowledge and that it would be inefficient to be conscious of all things at all
times.)
In fact, it is axiomatic that psi is threatening to many
people at this time in history, and it can easily be imagined how more people
with more efficacious psi would threaten various political, economic, and
social protected interests. Over the
last year, it has come to my attention repeatedly that famous financiers and
politicians have consulted assiduously with some medium, astrologer, or
clairvoyant. Yet, for centuries the
dominant message in most of the world’s cultures has been that such things are
hogwash or evil. What would happen if
the vast majority of people were to become more personally effective with their
psi?
Personal, familial and societal pressures have encouraged
the repression of psi, keeping it unconscious and small. As Carpenter says, we are all psychic all
the time, but mostly at a level that acceptable to our families and
cultures. In other words, what we call
normal, non-psychic behavior is, in fact, informed by psi, but the influence of
psi is mostly hidden and unconscious and the behavior that manifests is at a
level of efficacy that is acceptable in the world. More efficacy than that – ESP and PK -- is taboo.
When someone has a neurological incident and psi starts to
leak through more, it can be thought of as the return of the repressed. Some kind of pressure – from the personal
unconscious, from the collective unconscious, from Gaia, from the Tao – has
demanded that the individual repair the normative, but unnatural repression of
psi. Perhaps pressure has been mounting
for some time out of sight.
This is a chaotic opening – in fact, a spiritual
emergency. Psi is still so taboo. The paradigm shift from not believing in it
to believing in it is so big. The
ramifications of greater personal knowledge, power, and connectedness are so
huge. Very few people can roll with the
punches as they are introduced abruptly to a whole new relationship with
reality. There is often tremendous
fear. People may also feel guilt and
shame about having so much more potential.
And, for all the exciting aspects of it, it is still terribly
inconvenient. A big psi opening
requires that you change your life. So,
there is an opening to psi and, for many reasons, a lot of resistance or
blockage to psi. Tempest ensues.
We are also completely unprepared for and untrained in how
to integrate psi into our lives, so there is much misinterpretation of what’s
coming up. You could say, in general,
that in the First Sight model, psi is camouflaged as “normal perception and
behavior” most of the time. Only once
in awhile does it shed its protective coloring and stand out like a white crow
in a flock of black crows. By
extension, you could say that when neurological incident triggers a sudden
increase in psi, and there is chaos, the psi is camouflaged as various psychological
and physical symptoms. The predominant
one is fear. And, as Carpenter’s review
of the literature shows, anxiety interferes with psi.
What can we do to help?
If we extend our psychoanalytic analogy, we might say a good
therapeutic relationship, abreaction, working through, and insight would be
indicated. However, these elements may
be either contraindicated or not enough in a full-on spiritual emergency….That
is, unless you can be in a 1940s Menninger’s Clinic type set-up where you are
housed, fed, secure, and have no responsibilities….The fact is that in the early
part of recovery from the neurological damage caused by many psychotropic
medications, the dysautonomia is so severe, that people cannot use these
techniques.
Indeed, early recovery is a very primal struggle just to
survive – to be able to tolerate eating, to be able to sleep, to weather the
storm of physical and psychological symptoms such as akathisia, where
relentless inner vibration and agitation make you want to crawl out of your skin. For many people in this phase, the idea that
they might be having a psychic opening, and that they might get some relief
from re-interpreting some of their symptoms in this way, would be abhorrent. Each individual has to cobble together the
best approach for them in this nearly impossible situation. But, for others, this idea is a hopeful
pinprick of light in the darkness.
For these people, we need more systematic guidelines for how
to slowly, gently facilitate the return of the repressed psi on their own, when
a therapeutic relationship is not available or tolerable. With some guidelines, these people who have
become dismantled can slowly begin to put themselves back together in a new
way. Teasing out the psi from the
neuro-psycho-spiritual chaos should lead to symptom reduction.
Indeed, the ethnologist and psychologist Holger Kalweit
(1988, 1992) has interviewed countless shamans from many different cultures,
and found a common thread which is relevant for us here. The shamanic initiatory illness – a chaotic,
miserable concatenation of physical and psychological symptoms that the culture
has no treatment for – can go on for years, and often abates only when the
sufferer agrees to shamanize.
Shamanizing can take different forms – prophecy, healing, clairvoyance,
etc. – but only when the person embraces their latent, greater psi potential do
they emerge from the debilitating illness.
There are examples of contemporary Americans who illustrate
this pattern. Laura Alden Kamm
(personal communication 2005, 2006) had a massive cerebral infection and
surgery, and later a neurological shaking syndrome. She found she could get relief from the non-stop shaking when she
used her newly emerging ability to see inside the human body at every level
from the molecular to the gross anatomical.
Laura Bruno (2008) sustained traumatic brain injury from a car accident,
and began having terrible migraines, the first of which lasted many months
non-stop. She found she could get
relief from the migraines when she communicated to the intended recipient
medical intuition that came to her through claircognizance.
Facilitating the return of
the (transpersonal) repressed
Psychoanalytic theory is about the return of the repressed
personal unconscious. It could be said
that we are now talking about the return of the repressed transpersonal
unconscious, which is starting to leak through more, wants to be known, but
which needs help for that to happen, due to pathogenic beliefs and the
traumatic nature of what spurred the opening.
Our hypothesis is that facilitating the bringing to consciousness of psi
– our non-sensory connection to the whole – will bring relief from suffering
and ultimately lead to greater happiness.
The psychoanalyst and clinical parapsychologist Djohar Si
Ahmed has observed that non-ordinary states of consciousness – which can be
triggered by trauma or by certain therapies – create the opportunity for needed
transpersonal material to emerge to consciousness. The individual unwittingly will “recall to the surface…the
exact material that the psyche most vitally needs to promote a process of
change, development and healing” (Si Ahmed, 2012, pp. 69-70).
The Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz wrote that the
Self (the Jungian construct meaning the individual’s whole psyche – ego,
unconscious, and conscious) is at the center of the field of the collective
unconscious (von Franz, 1980, p. 64).
It’s an intriguing paradox that Jungians sometimes also say that the collective
unconscious is at the center of the Self!
(Gad, 2000, jung.org) Von Franz
went on to say that, according to Jung, the Self “is in an eternal process of
constant rejuvenation” that has a certain rhythm that dominates “the field of
the collective unconscious” (von Franz,
1988, pp. 65-66).
Especially relevant, for our purposes, is von Franz’s belief
that one could use well-crafted, classical divination techniques to bring
useful information to consciousness.
“…[O]ne could say that divination techniques are attempts,
by a chance throw of numbers, to find out what is the rhythm of the Self at a
particular moment. Jung sometimes
describes what we do when we consult the I Ching oracle by saying that it is
like looking at the world situation watch to find the moment one is in, while
the oracle would give the inner and outer world situation by which to govern
one’s actions” (von Franz, 1988, p. 66).
These observations by Si Ahmed and von Franz complement
Carpenter’s premise that all conscious experience and behavior are derived from
an ongoing, unconscious process of information-gathering and assessment that
includes psi (Carpenter, 2012, p. 18).
These observations jibe even more with what Carpenter says later in his
book about how people who are more psychic seem to get that way.
Carpenter coins the term “inadvertency” to capture the way
unconscious psi perceptions (he more precisely calls these “prehensions” since
they are not conscious perceptions) are often inadvertently alluded to by
spontaneous psychological events such as in image, mood, slip of the tongue or
impulsive act. Only through careful
observation and with enough data can we discern that such an inadvertency is
the telltale sign that we are being influenced by unconscious psi perceptions
(Carpenter, 2012, pp. 48, 52-55).
According to Carpenter, people who are more psychic are more
receptive to these inadvertencies, and more skilled and interested in exploring
them (Carpenter, 2012, pp. 317, 319-320).
He is focusing on those persons who show some control over the
expression of psi and some skill in understanding and using these
expressions (Carpenter, 2012, p. 316).
However, the case being made here is that people having a
neurological damage-induced psi opening are in a chaotic, crisis condition
caused, in part, by pressure for normal unconscious psi to become more
integrated into conscious awareness, as it probably should have been all
along. The thesis is that some of our
symptoms are misinterpreted psi or are caused by overly repressed psi, and that
if we could make the chaotically intruding, mostly camouflaged, psi more
conscious, symptoms would be reduced.
There are many methods for increasing effective access to
psi, including formal divination techniques, brainwave entrainment, meditation,
psychotherapy, psychic development circles, classes, and exercises. All of these have great value, but in the
case of some neurological incidents, including the early phase of recovery from
psychotropic medication damage, most people simply cannot tolerate them. The drug-induced dysautonomia is so severe
that even the most gentle therapies – such as guided relaxation and
visualization -- are over-stimulating!
What’s left is giving people a tool they can use themselves,
alone, at home, at their own pace, under their control, and that responds to
what is already going on. What’s being proposed is a kind of divination of
daily life, which can be started slowly and sporadically, and can be developed,
if found useful, into a whole new way of walking through life. This means approaching daily life with an
eye out for things like synchronicities, and paying close attention to thing
like spontaneous precognitions, and putting more focused effort into
interpreting them.
The ultimate goal would be for one to integrate information
from these sources more automatically, and to graduate to more advanced
psi. This scrupulous interpretation of
subtle evidence of psi is not the end point; it is the gateway. In a class I once took with parapsychologist
Loyd Auerbach, he paraphrased the renowned psychic Alex Tanous as saying
“Everyone is psychic. You just have to
notice. Once you notice, you notice
more. Then, it snowballs.”
Many people already live their lives this way, using daily
life as one big divination. But many
people do not, or only do it spottily.
If neurological incidents are partly about the return of the repressed,
natural psi, and if psi can be made much more conscious, then this approach
might be a crucial element of the recovery process.
At this point, I’m not sure whether the symptoms of
neurological damage contain specific unconscious psi meaning, or if it’s more
that they are a general sign that psi is being over-repressed and needs to come
out. The latter seems to have been the
case with Laura Alden Kamm and Laura Bruno, mentioned above, who both became
medical intuitives after brain trauma.
Their neurological symptoms simply abated when they “shamanized”; the
symptoms did not seem to be related to the specific content of the psi that was
expressed. Conceivably, it is the
general release of repressed psi that causes the general reduction in painful
symptoms.
The kind of phenomena one might pay closer attention to
includes synchronicities (ranging from the minor to the major), precognitive
elements in dreams (including precognitions about “unimportant” things),
occasional spontaneous hypnagogic visions (closed eye visuals), lucid dream
visitations from deceased loved ones (including asking “why now?,” as well as
paying closer attention to any messages and symbolism), mistakes or minor
accidents, and treating the whole day as one coherent message.
Much of the time, we note these things fleetingly, say
“that’s cool,” or “that’s weird,” and then forget them. A little practice with paying more attention
to them reveals that they are meatier than they appear at first glance. We will briefly discuss a more substantial
approach to synchronicities and to mistakes.
i. Synchronicity
The “A Course in Miracles” teacher Robert Perry (2009) has
done a remarkable job of creating an extremely helpful, thought-provoking model
of how to scrupulously analyze your own synchronicities and more fully extract
the guidance in them. This guidance can
easily remain latent or camouflaged unless you have the mind-set and take the
trouble to look at the synchronicities more closely.
In his book, “Signs:
A new approach to coincidence, synchronicity, guidance, life purpose,
and God’s plan, “ Perry focuses on super-synchronicities, which he calls
Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events (CMPEs). His criteria for these super-synchronicities is that the two
events occur very close in time (within 12 hours, preferably less), and occur
independently. When you look at them
more closely, you must be able to identify many parallel features in the two
incidents (preferably about eight).
Some of these parallels will be likely, some unlikely, and some more
general. When, you string together the list of parallels, it will form a
narrative (Perry, 2009, pp. 8-10, http://www.semeionpress.com/signs/model.php).
The first incident is called the Subject Situation. It will be something in your life that is
“current, uncertain, unresolved, or at least needing confirmation” (Perry,
2009, p.58). The second incident is
called the Symbolic Situation. Although
it will have a lot of parallels to the first situation, it will also contain
new information that illuminates the first situation.
There is often a lot of information in the synchronicity,
not just one idea, although there is always a main idea. Two independent raters, trained in this
model, should be able to come up with the same main message from the
synchronicity, and many of the subsidiary messages as well.
Perry has observed that these super-synchonicities often
occur in a series over time. In other words
a new pair of synchronous incidents might occur a year later (sometimes on the
very same date) that supports and elaborates on the first pair of
incidents. Also, although each
super-synchronicity is about a specific, current situation in your life, they
usually contain more general comments about your life as a whole (Perry, 2009,
p. 102).
Perry et al. (2011) recently published a pilot study of his
model in Psychiatric Annals, which reported very encouraging, measurable
results.
Having strict criteria helps enormously to avoid the
potential errors of inflating very small synchronicities or of misinterpreting
synchronicities in the direction of our hopes or fears. Following Perry’s rules is great training. Then, you can branch out and more loosely and
tentatively apply this way of thinking to lesser synchronicities, and to other
psi events in your life.
ii. Glitches
As you go about your day, errors, mistakes, and glitches can
be another way that unconscious psi comes into view. In keeping with our theme of borrowing from and expanding on
psychoanalytic ideas, analyzing errors to make psi more conscious can be seen
as an extension of the psychoanalytic use of slips of the tongue or parapraxes
as a way to reveal the personal unconscious.
Also, you might think of mistakes as a kind of negative synchronicity.
The phenomenally innovative and accomplished electronic
music composer Kim Cascone (2000) has written about the glitch genre of
electronic music, which emerged in the 1990s and continues to evolve. Over time, composers shifted from ruing the
glitches or errors produced by electronic and digital equipment to becoming
interested in them. Composers began to
utilize the spontaneously occurring sounds of technical error. Eventually, they started to create glitches
on purpose. You can see how this would
lead one to re-think what constitutes “failure and detritus” (Cascone, 2000,
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/casconetext.html).
More recently, Cascone (2011) has written a wonderful essay
called “Errormancy: Glitch as divination” for an exhibition entitled T0P0L0G1ES
by the Art of Failure collective. He
explains that, in addition to using glitches as a valuable part of your
artistic lexicon, you can also use them for divination. Digital glitches are not only a modern
version of the age-old tradition of aleatoricism, or the use of chance, in
creative endeavors. They are also
non-random, meaningful breakthroughs of information from another part of reality.
Just like earlier divination tools, electronic and digital
equipment can act “like a receiver,
carrying bits of wisdom from an a-temporal, non-spatial,
non-manifest reality.” The glitch
“parasitically uses a system as a conduit for the delivery of unexpected
wisdom…” The equipment does not produce
these messages on its own; it is a medium through which information
arrives. The glitch “can form a brief
rupture in the space-time
continuum, shuffling the psychic space of the observer,
allowing the artist to establish
a direct link with the supernal realm” (Cascone, 2011).
Furthermore, like Perry, Cascone has observed that you can
get a more elaborated message by following a series of glitches over time.
“Glitches can serve as accidental data points…encrypted
hieroglyphics. Each successive glitch helps to further define the previous one
by steadily sharpening a blurred focus.
A cluster of glitches can form an outline, define an area, trace a route
through uncharted space. This space is an n-dimensional ‘potential space’ and
glitches can be used to navigate this space, seeking unexpected patterns,
chance juxtapositions, and unveiling subliminal content” (Cascone, 2011).
He makes the excellent point that the digital artist can
easily be swamped by file upon file raw material and revisions. This is true for the rest of us as
well. “Navigating this space with
glitches can help one discover an essence, a grain hidden in the data – much
like a divining rod is used to seek out pockets of water underground. Working with glitches can forge a path
through this terrain, outline an approach, formulate an oblique strategy”
(Cascone, 2011).
Cascone has made a poetic appeal for the use of errormancy
in digital music, but the principle is the same for daily life. Glitches, errors, mistakes, parapraxes of
all kinds can be used as another way to make psi more conscious.
iii. Daily life as divination
This discussion of synchronicities and glitches demonstrates
how to begin to access unconscious psi, but these guidelines can be abstracted
and applied to other elements of one’s daily life – including both events that
seem anomalous, and those that simply call your attention. They can also be used to look for overall
patterns in a day or an epoch.
Anomalous events include, but are not limited to, precognitive
elements in dreams, occasional spontaneous hypnagogic visions (closed eye
visuals), lucid dreams, including visitations from deceased loved ones, or
minor synchronicities, such as seeing the same uncommon word in three different
places in an hour. Events that simply
call your attention could be anything.
Examples might be a song coming into your head, an image in a magazine
fascinating you, or any dream content.
The day, itself, can be treated as unit of meaning that has
camouflaged psi within it, as can an epoch of your life, such as the recovery
period from neurological damage. This
way of thinking is analogous to the psychoanalytic approach of treating one
whole therapy session as a single communication, sort of as if it were one
dream..
In his chapter on people who have psi more integrated into
their lives, Carpenter also mentions the idea of applying a divinatory approach
more broadly –
“One particular technique apparently used by several
relatively psychic persons I have known might be called ‘serial divination’, by
which I mean a process of imagining associations to some inadvertency (say a
bit of dream content), and following that by treating those associations as
material to question by further imagining associations to those, and so on, all
the while avoiding jumping to some conclusion that seems too ‘logical’. Then, finally, one reaches a sense of
unanticipated rightness” (Carpenter, 2012, p. 320).
The main idea of daily life as divination is that there is
more to be gleaned from looking in a systematic way at the small instances of
psi that are breaking through in a chaotic psi opening, and that practicing
this systematic attention will make psi progressively more conscious, and that
this will lead to symptom reduction and a blossoming of one’s overall
development.
This is a very analytic approach, and it will be absolute
anathema to some people. There are many
other ways to make psi more conscious.
This avenue is proposed because it potentially more manageable to people
in the deep distress of recent neurological damage, specifically dysautonomia,
who cannot tolerate many of the more interpersonal or intensive approaches to
psi development. This method is closely
tied to what is actually happening in the individual’s day, and can be explored
alone, and as slowly as needed. It is
also clearly meant for people for whom psi is coming to consciousness in a
camouflaged way, as opposed to those more rare individuals who suddenly find
themselves with a great deal of unambiguous psi. They have different challenges.
Carpenter’s proposal of the ubiquity of unconscious psi is a
crucial contribution to improving our understanding of what is happening in a
neurological damage-induced psi opening, and to our brainstorming what to do to
help it.
It’s like being born with two perfectly good arms, but you
grow up in a culture that says you have no left arm, and if you ever use your
left arm as a kid, your family frowns, so you stop using your left arm, and you
go through the bulk of your life using only your right arm. You forget you even have a left arm; it
atrophies, and you’re even in denial about it being there.
Then one day you get hit by a bolt from the blue in the form
of some extreme experience. Your life
is turned upside down. You’re sick as a
dog. The nerves in your let arm start
twitching. Circulation there
increases. It may hurt. You sort of remember you have a left
arm. You start flexing it. It’s discoordinated from lack of use.
Slowly, you integrate your left arm into your life. Now you’re whole….and now you can do
handstands, which you could never do before.
Sources:
Boag, S. (2010).
Repression, suppression, and conscious awareness. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 27, 164-181. http://mq.academia.edu/SimonBoag/Papers/1587533/Repression_suppression_and_conscious_awareness
Bruno, L.
(2008). If I only had a brain
injury. Xlibris Corporation.
Carpenter, J.C.
(2012). First sight: ESP and parapsychology in everyday
life. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Cascone, K.
(2000). The aesthetics of
failure: “Post-digital” tendencies in
contemporary computer music. Computer
Music Journal, 24, 12-18.
http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/casconetext.html
Cascone, K.
(2011). Errormancy: Glitch as
divination. From an exhibition entitled
T0P0L0G1ES by the Art of Failure collective, July 2011.
Gad, I. (2000). Jung’s model of the psyche.
http://www.jung.org/jungs%20model%20of%20the%20psyche_gad.html
Garrett, E.
(1968). Many voices: The autobiography of a medium. New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Kalweit, H.
(1988). Dreamtime and inner
space: The world of the shaman. Boston:
Shambhala.
Kalweit, H.
(1992). Shamans, healers, and
medicine men. Boston: Shambhala.
Kamm, L.A.
(2006). Intuitive wellness: Using your body’s inner wisdom to heal. New York:
Atria Books.
Mayer, E.L.
(2007). Extraordinary
knowing: Science, skepticism, and the
inexplicable powers of the human mind.
New York: Bantam Books.
Morin, A. (2006). Levels of consciousness and
self-awareness: A comparison and integration of various neurocognitive views.
Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 358-371.
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robottheory/self-awareness_review.pdf
Perry, R.
(2009). Signs: A new approach to coincidence,
synchronicity, guidance, life purpose, and God’s plan. Sedona, Arizona: Semeion Press. http://www.semeionpress.com/signs/index.php
Perry, R., Landon, M.K., Greyson, B., Whitfield, C.,
Whitfield, B.H., Perry, N. (2011). An initial study of extreme, measurable
forms of synchronicity. Psychiatric
Annals, 41, 577-583.
http://www.healio.com/psychiatry/journals/PsycAnn/%7B9A16E2E0-8731-4D30-97A1-A473CBBCE7EF%7D/An-Initial-Study-of-Extreme-Measurable-Forms-of-Synchronicity
Rochat, P.
(2003). Five levels of
self-awareness as they unfold early in life.
Consciousness and Cognition, 12, 717-31. http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/Rochat5levels.pdf
Si Ahmed, D. (2012). Psychotherapeutic
approaches to Major Paranormal Experiences (MPE). In Kramer, W.H., Bauer,
E., & Hövelmann, G. (Eds.) Perspectives of clinical
parapsychology: An introductory reader, Bunnik, The Netherlands:
Stichting Het Johan Borgman Fonds.
von Franz, M.
(1980). On divination and
synchronicity: The psychology of
meaningful chance. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Winnicott, D.W. (nd
/ 1989). Knowing and not knowing: A clinical example. In Winnicott, C., Sheperd, R., & Davis,
M. (Eds.) Psychoanalytic explorations.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Wise, A.
(2004). The high-performance
mind: Mastering brainwaves for insight,
healing, and creativity. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin.
