Developing Your Unseen Powers: A Practical Guide

Brendan D. Murphy, New Dawn   
Repeated ignorant or stubborn denial of the existence of certain powers does not keep them from existing – except for us!
~ Harold M. Sherman, psychic

Everyone has some level of innate intuitive capability, as has been demonstrated repeatedly over several decades of experiments by the parapsychological community through tens of thousands of trials utilizing thousands of regular people with no known or presupposed psychic gifts. (That is to say nothing, of course, of those many successful experiments carried out with people having well established reputations for performing “paranormal” feats.)

While some people are born with obvious psychic talents, most of us have to invest time and effort over the long-term in order to develop them from their latent state. In this article we will look at some guidelines and relevant principles for unblocking and developing your innate intuitive abilities.

Open Your Mind & Eliminate Closed Ones

Have you ever noticed how closed-minded skeptic (CMS) rarely if ever have any experiences with the siddhis (psychic faculties) or “the paranormal” in general? Soviet research into psychokinesis involving Nina Kulagina demonstrated qualitatively that a skeptic mere presence has an effect on a psychic’s ability to function properly. Hence, with a CMS (or several) in the room or otherwise involved in the experiment, a psychic is more likely to “fail,” thus “proving” the CMS right (at least in his own narrow reality tunnel). It is merely a case of self-fulfilling prophecy. Thus, regarding your own psi abilities what you believe is true, to a large extent – and unfortunately the presence of non-believers nearby or within the experimental setup can be detrimental.

Dr. Valerie Hunt’s research in Infinite Mind showed a correlation between electromagnetic auric frequencies and the “level” of consciousness occupied by the individual. Healers, mediums and mystics show higher frequencies in their electromagnetic fields than others not of those categories, illustrating that those possessed of “higher” consciousness are, in some sense, literally “on a higher frequency.” Those fixated on or believing solely in “material reality” exhibited lower dominant frequencies and were bereft of the higher.

In fact, gamma frequencies in the brain of 40-100 Hertz – the highest of the better known bands of brainwave frequencies (the higher band being Lambda, reaching up to about 200 Hz1) – have been linked to the ability to manifest intention in the world. Gamma states represent the brain in hyperdrive, working at its most intensity. “This oscillation is conducive to creating links across many parts of the brain,”² facilitating an integrated whole-brain state. Paradoxically, the extreme high and low ends of the brainwave spectrum have the same states of consciousness associated with them, and different oscillations can be present at once in different parts of the same brain.³

To illustrate, Russian Psychokinetic (PK) psi star Nina Kulagina (1926–1990) – who, under controlled experimental conditions, could (among other things) separate an egg yoke from the white from a distance of 6 feet while it floated in a saline solution using only her intention – exhibited low frequency theta brainwaves of 4 Hz – normally associated with a deeply relaxed trance – whilst simultaneously showing extreme physiological agitation/arousal, including a pulse rate of 240 bpm. These strenuous efforts left her absolutely exhausted, and temporarily blind on that particular occasion.⁴

Perhaps all of the above explains why Kulagina’s PK abilities “worked better in an atmosphere of friendly mutual trust and belief” – PK, as we know, generally requires intense states of physiological arousal and higher frequency brainwave activity, all of which drains large reserves of bioenergy. PK is a higher brain function. Kulagina experienced less stress when working alone and it was said that her PK ability was mood-dependent (both her own mood and that of the observers) and expended more energy in a hostile or sceptical atmosphere⁵ (where the local consciousness fields would have been less coherent).

Hostile skeptics have something of an innate psi- or consciousness-damping effect; they literally operate at a lower frequency, their mind fields interfering with those of the test subject (and even the target). The fact that separate minds interact via measurable electromagnetic fields (and some not-so-measurable fields) has been proven by Hunt and others, and I detail much of this research in The Grand Illusion (TGI).

Negativity causes chaos and/or entropy in the personal and local ambient energy fields, whereas positivity, gratitude, or love – heart-based emotions – cause coherence, beauty and order – just look at the instances of saints and yogis whose dead bodies have remained impervious to decay for weeks, months, and even years!⁶ This is worth considering before any psi endeavour where you intend to act as a receiver of information. Firstly, open-mindedness is a bare minimum requirement (confidence and trust in the process is even better).

Additionally, being in a state of peaceful heart-based coherence is likely to enhance receptive abilities. In combination with deliberate intention, this has been shown to also be enough to wind and unwind DNA samples at will in laboratory conditions, with powerful implications for self-healing possibilities (see TGI).

In 1942 psychologist and parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler initiated her infamous “sheep-goat” experiments, designed to test whether belief and open-mindedness would enhance psi function in contrast to scepticism. Two groups, “sheep” who believed in or were simply open to psi, and “goats” who did not believe it could happen for them under test conditions (but were not hostile to the possibility of it happening to or for other people), were put through identical standard controlled Extrasensory Perception (ESP) tests. The outcome indicated that believers in the possibility of ESP scored better than those who did not: the disbelievers scored lower, ergo belief is a legitimate variable mediating psi functions.⁷ “A meta-analysis by [psychologist Tony Lawrence], covering 73 experiments by 37 different researchers, clearly confirms that subjects who believe in psi obtain, on the average, higher results than those who do not believe in it.”⁸ American psychic and author Harold Sherman (1898–1987) had noted in the early 1940s that while it is possible to receive thought impressions from a sceptic, it is extremely difficult for someone of that mindset to act as receiver.⁹ Sherman, who was ahead of his time, explained that telling yourself with certitude there is no such thing as psi is tantamount to instructing your subconscious mind to shut down the psi faculties so they do not operate for you.¹⁰ In a dream-like reality such as ours, it pays to be open-minded – especially if you want to be more intuitive.

Meaning, Emotion, Need, Novelty & Other Factors in Psi

Need, novelty, and emotion have long been known to play a part in psi phenomena. Carl Jung (1875–1961) – the originator of the theory of psychological archetypes – noted with interest that the English medium Eileen Garrett fared poorly in parapsychologist J.B. Rhine’s card-guessing experiments because she was unable to conjure any feelings for Rhine’s “soulless” test-cards.11 Much experimentation has also shown that psi effects have a tendency to start out higher in the initial stages of testing and then drop off as the participants lose interest and boredom sets in (the “decline effect”). Charles Tart actually went so far as stating that card-guessing experiments are, ironically, “a technique for extinguishing [psi] in the laboratory,” that is, they bore the subjects into a decline effect.12 Rhetorically, Sherman asked how he could possibly be expected to get excited over five abstract symbols that had nothing to do with his emotional system or that of the sender (they lacked meaning/personal significance or relevance).¹³

Biologist and author Lyall Watson notes in Supernature that the most effective telepathic messages generally are bound up in trauma and crisis – and we see plenty of evidence to that effect in The Grand Illusion Vol. 1. He continues to explain that it makes sense biologically, since states of well-being and pleasure produce no sense of urgency – such information can be leisurely conveyed by the “normal” channels. However, for alarm signals to be of real use, they have to travel the fastest way possible.¹⁴ That “way” is superluminally/nonlocally. Much as Cleve Backster’s plants could detect the death of bacteria and brine shrimp nearby, our human telepathic connections must – even if only subliminally – serve a biological imperative, helping us survive and propagate as a species by sensing and avoiding danger.

The limbic system, which includes the amygdala and hippocampus, is considered today to be the emotional center in the brain, as well as the seat of our survival instinct. We might therefore suppose that life-threatening events, usually being highly emotionally charged, might ignite the temporal lobe and related structures in the brain into downloading nonlocal psi information from the vacuum/ether. Dr. Melvin Morse believes humans have a sixth sense ability located “within” the right temporal lobe, hippocampus, and related limbic structures. According to him, this region “interprets information obtained through communication with an interactive universe,” and allows for telepathic communication with other people through their right temporal lobes. “It involves perception of other realities.” He states that we perceive the operation of the right temporal lobe as “intuition.”¹⁵

In 1889 a committee of psychical researchers began a five-year project of compiling what they named a Report on the Census of Hallucinations – the first major research effort of the English Society for Psychical Research, featuring 410 data collectors. The committee included Henry and Eleanor Sidgwick, Alice Johnson, arch-sceptic Frank Podmore, and the esteemed Frederick Myers. Out of the 17,000 responses, 2,273 people reported having had “hallucinations” (psi experiences). Tellingly, most occurred in a crisis, usually a death crisis, signifying the importance of emotion, need, and above all, meaning in paranormal events.16 These were some of the earliest scientific results illustrating nonlocal correlations between well-acquainted (meaningfully connected) people. Aside from raw emotion, biological threats to loved ones (or oneself), and so on, another factor conducive to psi is simply novelty. Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff in their scientific remote viewing research in the 1970s found that the more difficult and challenging a remote viewing (RV) task they devised for test subjects, the more likely the results were to be good. They, too, observed a need-serving theme in their RV research at Stanford (see Chapter 12 of TGI). As a result of consistently challenging and interesting tests and protocols (with the added benefits of feedback and encouragement), they found that their subjects actually improved their psi performance over time, in contrast to Rhine’s and others’ results with card-guessing and other repetitious and dull forms of testing, where decline effects were often observed.

In Sherman’s view, the absence of a strong or even an ordinary emotional factor is the greatest handicap in any psychic endeavor. Since his pioneering long-distance telepathy experiment with Sir Hubert Wilkins decades ago (detailed in New Dawn 136 and Chapter 11 of TGI), much data has accumulated indicating there is a great deal of truth in this. The stronger the emotional charge, the greater the likelihood that psi data will penetrate from the “subconscious” to the conscious mind.

It is well known by occultists that emotionally charged events are more likely to impress themselves, inadvertently or otherwise, on the mind of another than are events with little emotional content. In occult terms, this interaction beyond the standard space-time realm is occurring via the astral plane/octave – the home of emotion. The more strongly the plasma-like astral body/field (or mind-field) can be made to vibrate in response to emotional content, the more likely the relevant data penetrates through from the subconscious to the conscious level of awareness. When sleep is involved, the conditions seem to be even more conducive to accidental telepathic contact, as it is an altered state of consciousness (theta and delta brainwave states) that opens us up to the frequencies of the astral or even mental planes while simultaneously eliminating most data/noise from the physical senses.

Undoubtedly, much “paranormal phenomena” (including poltergeist phenomena, PK, and telepathy) can be linked to strong emotional content. There are indications that what we experience as presentiment or precognition may be, in some sense, the strong emotional content of a probable “future” event (which is actually occurring in a parallel universe in present time, along with all our “past” and “future” lives) then filtering “back” through time into our subconscious or even conscious awareness. (See Chapter 12 of TGI.)

Hypnosis

Hypnosis can aid our ability to peer into these “future” events and timelines. The young actress Irene Muza was in a hypnotic trance when she was asked if she could see what awaited her in her future. She wrote that her career would be short and her death would be “terrible,” though she dared not specify how she would die. The experimenters erased what Muza had written before bringing her out of the trance so she would not see it. She therefore had no conscious knowledge of what she had written. Some months later, however, in 1909, her prediction of a short career and terrible death was unexpectedly fulfilled when her hairdresser allowed some drops of an antiseptic lotion made of mineral essences to fall on a lighted stove, instantly enveloping Muza in flames. Her hair and clothing set alight, she was severely burned and tragically died in hospital a few hours later.¹⁷

Hypnosis has been successfully employed for Psychokinetic purposes as well. Take American Ted Serios, the “thoughtographer” born in 1918 who could create color pictures on unexposed film simply through sheer will and intention while he stared into the lens of a Polaroid camera. His talent grew out of a DIY hypnosis experiment with a friend (a fellow bellhop at the Chicago Conrad Hilton Hotel) who instructed Serios under hypnosis that he could take photos of the contents of his mind. And thereafter, so he could – somewhat erratically, mind you. (Serios was tested extensively under controlled conditions.)

Interestingly, Serios had to work himself virtually into a state of rage to be effective during these experiments. Notably, Israeli “paranormalist” Uri Geller has been able to achieve similar feats, taking photos of himself on high-speed black and white film through a solid black lens cap. Dr. Chris Humphrey explains this is due to quantum tunnelling: if the quantum de Broglie probability wave exists on both sides of a barrier, then its particle (photons in this case) can sometimes be on one side, and sometimes on the other, without ever passing through the barrier.¹⁸

PK: Set Your Intent, Let Go & “Let God”

During his first stay at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI – now Stanford Research Institute International), Ingo Swann worked on experiments with physicist Hal Puthoff, who was making forays into researching psi ability. This example demonstrates that we can and do interact with matter via our minds, whether we intend to consciously or not (and even under pressure and in the presence of skeptics in this case).

On the evening of the 6th of June 1972, Swann was asked to try to influence a magnetometer located in the basement, which he was duly escorted down to, with one catch: the magnetometer – inside a quark detector, in actual fact – was buried under five feet of concrete underneath his feet, and thus invisible to him. What was visible to the extremely chagrined Swann (who was not forewarned by Puthoff of the nature of the experiment) was a chart recorder with its pen slowly tracing out a graceful wavy line. It was “monitoring the magnetic stability of the magnetometer and had been doing so for some weeks without any change in the rhythmic fluctuations,” Swann recalls. “The whole of this contraption was encased in an aluminium container and insulating copper canister. As well, it was in a supercooled, hence superconducting shield.” The Josephson junction inside the detector would detect any variation of magnetic flux in the supercooled equipment and the effect would show up as a change in the steady sine wave recording on the chart which they could all see.

Swann started “probing” mentally to see if he could identify the expensive underground device, and when he sensed some “metallic differences” he tried to affect them, stating so as he went along. With all eyes glued on the sine wave, Swann attempted several times to perturb the well-shielded system, but to no avail. Insisting that he could see something, Swann proposed that sketching it out might assist the process. When no paper could be found to draw on, Puthoff suggested he draw directly onto the chart paper. “So I sketched a this, and then a that: ‘Is this the Josephson junction?’ I asked. ‘If so, I think I can see it quite well’.” With that comment, the ink pen gave a tiny jerk, and then stopped momentarily. Then it lifted up above its previous pattern, and “somewhat above this it wobbled along for no less than about TEN SECONDS – long enough for two wavy line intervals to have occurred.”¹⁹

The point here is that when the distortion in the sine wave took place Swann was not trying to affect the equipment – he was simply trying to sketch what he could see with his mind’s eye. In those moments where his volitional mind was distracted and his goal momentarily suspended, the desired outcome occurred effortlessly. In laboratory tests with PK in ordinary people (Swann is known to be a gifted psychic, though more in the realm of remote viewing than PK), effects often fail to appear until the subject has their attention diverted.20 This is something that astral traveller Sylvan Muldoon wrote of some 80 years ago, explaining that charging the mind with desire or intent creates “stress” for which the mind seeks an outlet or release via a part of the subconscious he called the cryptoconscious Will: “Then [it] gets a chance to work on the ‘stress,’ and that which you had given up trying to attain ‘materialises’!”²¹

Tips for Development

• Open your mind to the possibility that psi can work for you
• Believe in yourself
• Operate in a peaceful state of heart-based coherence for receptive psi (such as receiving a telepathic signal)
• Remove yourself from distractions and hostile or sceptical parties whose chaotic energy fields may negatively influence your own
• Meditate for psi development (the more the better). If you can participate in a group of people with a mutual interest in their perceptual development, then all the better. I used to attend a trance mediumship group – not necessarily because I wanted to “channel,” but it did accelerate my clairvoyant development. The coherent group energy will heighten and refine your own through a “quantum additive” effect, accelerating your development. When I stopped attending the group my nascent clairvoyant faculties unfortunately regressed back to square one.
• For PK, a less passive, more aroused state of heightened emotion may be desirable. If you want to bend spoons or change the weather it might help to get fired up!
• Eliminate psi-negative beliefs at the conscious level by being well informed on the reality of the psi faculties (reading my book TGI 1 will definitely achieve that goal).
• Eliminate subconscious negative (psi-blocking) beliefs through techniques such as Psyche-K and perhaps also EFT.
• Try letting go and “getting out of the way.” Sometimes your intention has a way of manifesting when you direct your attention on to something else, or, as some have put it, when you “let go and let God.” Try setting your intention, letting the thought go, and trusting that the deed will be done.
• A slightly different tactic: be grateful in advance that your attempt has already been successful. “All great masters know in advance that the deed has been done.” The aether/vacuum doesn’t “do” linear time. It only “knows” the present moment. Thus, what is true for you in the present is what will continually present itself to you until that truth changes.
• If you want to design experiments or tests for receptive/perceptual psi, find ways to make it novel, interesting, and meaningful to you personally. Avoid boredom at all costs!
• Practise some form of pranayama (yogic breathing) on a daily basis for maximal development of your health and psychic faculties.

You can read more about this subject matter in Brendan Murphy’s new book The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis Of Science And Spirituality – Book 1, available for purchase at www.brendandmurphy.net. If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

Footnotes:
1. Extraordinary States, www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html.
2. D. Church, The Genie in Your Genes, Energy Psychology Press, 2009, 99.
3. Extraordinary States.
4. L. Watson, Supernature, Coronet Books, Hodder Paperbacks Ltd, 1974, 139-40.
5. J.D. LaMoth & L.F. Maire III (Defence Intelligence Agency), Soviet and Czechoslovakian Parapsychology Research, 1975.
6. See B.D. Murphy, The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science & Spirituality Vol. 1, Balboa Press, 2013.
7. I. Swann, Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh9.html
8. Who is Mario Varvoglis?, www.parapsych.org/members/m_varvoglis.html.
9. H. Wilkins & Harold Sherman, Thoughts Through Space, Hampton Roads, 2004, xx.
10. Thoughts Through Space, xxi.
11. C.G. Jung, Synchronicity, First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback Edition, 1973, 18.
12. Russell Targ & Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach, Hampton Roads, 2005, 11.
13. Thoughts Through Space, 129.
14. Supernature, 260.
15. P.M.H. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences, Hampton Roads, 2007, 340.
16. M. Grosso, Experiencing the Next World Now, Paraview Pocket Books, 2004, 27-8.
17. C. Wilson, The Occult, Watkins Publishing, 2004, 127-8.
18. C. Humphrey, UFOs, Psi and Spiritual Evolution, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2004.
19. I. Swann, The Varian Hall of Physics, www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/RealStoryCh37.html.
20. Supernature, op. cit., 151-2.
21. S. Muldoon & Hereward Carrington, The Projection of the Astral Body, Rider Books, 1992. About the Author

BRENDAN D. MURPHY is the author of the critically acclaimed epic The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality, Vol. 1, and a contributing writer for several popular magazines and websites. If you like this article, then “like” “The Grand Illusion (TGI)” fan page on Facebook for more articles, information, book excerpts, and general developments. Hailed as a “masterpiece” by fellow leading-edge author Sol Luckman (Potentiate Your DNA), Volume 1 of TGI is now available for purchase at www.brendandmurphy.net.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 7 No 2

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