ESP: How to Develop Yours

It's happened to you. For some reason, thoughts about a person you know pop into your head. The phone rings. Amazingly, it's that very person you were thinking of who is calling. Or you're driving in your car and begin humming a song. You turn on the radio, and that same song is playing. Or perhaps you're at work and are suddenly overcome with a sense of dread. You're compelled to call home, only to learn that a family member has been stricken with an illness.

Unexplainable events like these happen to all of us at one time or another. Are they merely coincidences, or are they evidence of a human sense - the sixth sense - that we do not yet fully understand? Is there such a thing as ESP - extrasensory perception? And if so, can any person develop and strengthen it? Many believers say yes.

ESP, according to the Association for Research and Enlightenment, is "the ability to receive or send information not using the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch and smell." Hence, the term, "sixth sense." And it generally consists of five categories:

• telepathy - mind-to-mind communication
• clairvoyance - seeing events or objects through an inner sight
• precognition - the ability to view events before they occur
• retrocognition - the ability to view past events
• psychometry - the ability to learn the history of an object by touching it

These capabilities are generally thought to be the sole province of psychics, people - like famed clairvoyant Sylvia Browne - supposedly born with these abilities, or who have acquired the gift through some paranormal or traumatic event. Yet renowned psychics like Edgar Cayce believed that everyone is psychic to some degree because, as he said, it was a "natural ability of the soul." The folks at The Science of the Paranormal agree, saying, "All people have what are called 'psychic abilities,' but in most of us, these abilities are too 'weak' to be detected, much less be of any use."

Fortunately, there are exercises, even devices that you can construct and tools you can use, to help you develop your latent psychic powers. One of them are Zener cards - five cards each imprinted with distinctive symbol. Originated by the parapsychology lab at Duke University, Zener cards were developed specifically for telepathic experiments. Simply put, you test your ESP by "guessing" which symbol is on a chosen card.

At The Science of the Paranormal you'll learn how to tap into the subconscious mind through various techniques and tools - what they call "psychic levers" that stimulate the "Ideo-Motor Response (IMR)." IMR, they say, are small changes in muscle tension in response to subconscious stimuli. You can test them and perhaps even learn to control these levers using a pendulum, a Ouija board or a "random field" device, which they show you how to construct.

Using The Energy Wheel, a simple device you can make at home, the makers say you can cause a lightweight rotor "to spin and, on your mental command, you can stop the rotor rotation and reverse the direction of the rotor's spin." They even claim that with practice, you can mentally control the rotor from several feet away.

The key to getting your psychic juices flowing, it seems, is lots of practice. The more you work on it, concentrate on it, and experiment, the better you get at it. Whether you're a beginner or you've been trying to develop your ESP for some time, you might want to check out the Web-based ESP Tester. (You'll need the Shockwave plug-in.) In the test (which takes a while to download), you're asked to guess which of 10 colors the random generator will choose. You're given 20 chances, and receive many points for a dead-on guess and fewer points just for getting close to the right answer. At the end you're given a score. This is the kind of test you might want to try many times and over a long time period to see if your score - and your ESP powers - improve. (I scored a paltry 70 out of a possible 400 points in my first attempt.)

Here are some other online ESP tests:

• Take the ESP Test - This one utilizes the Zener cards. See if you can find the one with the circle on it.
• Zener Card Extrasensory Perception Test - This also utilizes the Zener cards, but gives you 25 sets of them to guess on.

Is Science Starting to Recognize ESP?

What does the scientific world have to say about ESP? Naturally, it's skeptical. According to the Psychological Bulletin in its article, "Does PSI Exist?", "most academic psychologists do not yet accept the existence of psi" - another term for ESP, or what they call "anomalous processes of information or energy transfer." (Sheesh! Scientists!) Yet, remarkably, they cite that 55 percent of natural scientists and 77 percent of academics in the arts, humanities and education believe that ESP is either an established fact or a likely possibility! Psychologists, by and large, remain the most skeptical, according to Thinking Critically About ESP, because they know "how easily people are deceived" and because of the lack of reproducible results.

Scientific evidence for ESP might be close at hand, however, thanks to studies conducted by such organizations as the Society for Psychical Research. Quite interesting is a press release from the Society for Scientific Exploration entitled "A Possible Discovery Regarding ESP," which relates how data gathered by James Spottiswoode of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto, Calif. shows a mysterious correlation between the "effect size" in 2,500 laboratory ESP experiments and sidereal time. In other words, ESP experiments were demonstrated to be much more successful at a certain time of day. "I've checked my data carefully," Spottiswoode says. "Don't ask me what it is, but it's real."

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are primarily interested in communicating psychically with their pets. At Interspecies Telepathic Communication, you'll read about ESP encounters with Dancer, the Hot Dog Eating Llama and Messages from Mamma Kitty among others. Oh, well.

Previous Features