Some Dynamics of Psychic Perception

Here are some things I learned about the way psychic perceptions work, based on my own experience.

By “psychic perceptions” I mean things like extrasensory communication (“mind reading”), precognition, clairvoyance, and other phenomena in which information about what we call the outer world – present or future or past -- comes into our consciousness without use of the commonly recognized five senses.

1. There is a certain feeling - I compared it to a slight electrical shock – that comes with a valid psychic perception. I’ve also felt the sensation of a bubble rising to the surface of dark water and popping.

2. The first impression is always the correct one. As soon as the reasoning mind starts to evaluate and judge and shuffle through different possibilities, the subsequent impressions are false.

3. Precognitions are usually of things in the near future. Attempts to predict the distant future – months or years away – usually fail, although there have been cases in which fiction writers unwittingly and inadvertently predicted future happenings with amazing accuracy. (Some people have reported several nights of repetitive dreams about some coming disaster, but I’ve never experienced anything like that myself.)

4. The closer the foreseen event is, the more impressive or vivid the premonition is likely to be.

5. Just as a memory tends to be triggered by association with something in the present moment, precognitions tend to be triggered by something in the present. For example, I thought of “Hully Gully” when I was looking at astrological charts of a period when I had foreseen the winners of horse races. The coordinates of the sunken submarine came to me as I was reading about the loss of the submarine.

6. Precognition tends to work like memory in reverse: The most recent memories are usually the most easily remembered; the nearest future events are the most easily and frequently perceived. Association with something in the present attracts both related memories and related precognitions.
(I found that numbers that popped into my head when I was leaving to drive to a race track never worked; it was only those that came to me after the end of the previous race that were reliable. My false impressions were both too far ahead in time and not closely associated with a specific race.)

7. Alertness to psychic impressions is important to recognizing them when they occur, but deliberately looking for them, trying to find them, confuses imagination with psychic perception and almost guarantees lack of success.

8. To encourage psychic perception about a particular matter without becoming too active about it, assume a passive but attentive attitude and bring something into the present which is somehow related to the desired information. . . whether it be an object, an image, sounds, or written words. Then catch that fleeting first impression.

9. Psychic perceptions on an everyday basis can be increased and improved by sincerely believing they happen and by being open and attuned to their possible occurrence. (Some believe that practice helps. I read a short book by an Irish writer which described his practice of going through many packs of cards and predicting which card would be turned up next. He said that doing that on a regular, long-term, basis greatly improved predictive ability.)

10. There is such a thing as beginner’s luck when it comes to hunches. I’ve found that when I visited a race track after a long time, or went to a casino for the first time, I always won more at the beginning than I ever did thereafter. I wondered if this was because psychic “power” came from some kind of “battery” which ran down after use but charged up during disuse. I also conjectured that it might be because the imagination, and the calculating mind with its doubts and “reasonable” suggestions, were caught off guard during the first spontaneous wagers and took a little while to begin to interfere with actual psychic perceptions.

In my next post I want to get away from gambling and, just for fun, write about examples of psychic occurrences. I hope readers will contribute their own experiences by way of comments or emails.