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.

My Own Kind of Miracle

The "Flammarion Woodcut"


On rare days I’ve had trouble coming up with a subject for FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS, but now I’m having trouble deciding which of several ideas I want to pursue. To create continuity I’ve decided to give an account of the most improbable thing that has happened to me . . . other than just being here.

When I was living in Pompano Beach, Florida, I quickly became aware of a bright glow in the western sky at night. As soon as I learned that the light emanated from the Pompano Park Harness Track my own track was determined. I’d already manifested an interest in gambling, propelled not by the ambition to win large amounts of money, but rather by the belief I could discover a system that would make me world famous (and incidentally win large amounts of money).

It’s interesting that I sailed into life with an innate faith that there was a “key” to unlock the mysteries of everything if only I could find it. I never considered that the inner workings of the universe might be impenetrable. I assumed that if I gathered enough data and did enough research on any subject – whether horse racing, casino gambling, the stock market, psychic phenomena, the workings of the universe -- I would find the key and be able to explain and predict outcomes.

And so I became a regular at Pompano Park in the evenings, laden with a notebook and racing records, looking for patterns. For some reason I wasn’t as drawn to handicapping and the recent condition of horses (probably the only sources of a “system” that might actually win over time) as I was to the mystique of patterns, but I looked at everything for a possible answer. I spent more time poring over racing records and manipulating numbers (before the days of computers) than I did at the track. After hundreds of hours I had discovered one mysterious thing, but not the key to winning: Any system that seems foolproof when applied to all previous races will fail as soon as one actually uses it for betting. That was a more interesting discovery than anything else I learned about wagering systems, and I’m not the first person to mention it.

At any rate, weeks went by and I was no further ahead financially than I had been on the first day. Once I really thought I had found the answer when I began talking with a man who followed the harness races around the country in the company of his mother. He told me to pay attention only to the changing odds on the electric board up until the starting bell. Did a horse’s odds start high or low compared to the morning line? Was there a “drastic drop” at some point? And so forth. The idea was that the races were mostly fixed – probably true – and the betting of those in the know would give clues as to which horse was the planned winner. Well, that provided me with entertainment for many hours and many sheets of paper, with the usual so-so results after an initial appearance of success.

By the latter part of the season, when I went to the track I was burdened not only with a very heavy notebook but with very negative emotions. One night – a turning point in my life – I was sitting behind three women who obviously had never been to the races before. As I lost money on every race using my scientific research systems, they were winning frequently. What was their method?

I leaned forward and listened closely before each race.

“Here’s a horse named Lady Jane. I have an Aunt Jane and I’d die if that horse won and I didn’t bet on it.”

“Look here: The first two numbers of my social security number.”

“My dog was named ‘Flash’. Look at this!”

As I saw them win with such a “system” I began to hear that silent voice in my consciousness that I’ve learned always to heed: “Throw away the papers,” it said again and again. “Throw away the papers and bet what comes into your head.”

It wasn’t easy to do, but I climbed a few grandstand stairs and dropped my entire collection of paperwork, including the night’s racing programme, into a trash can. I turned, feeling unburdened, and suddenly the number “9” came into my head like a bubble popping on the surface of black water. I went to a window, bought a ticket on 9 to win, place, or show, and went back to my seat. Yes, to my amazement, 9 pulled ahead in the straightaway and finished first by a length.

I felt dizzy, but not so dizzy that I didn’t notice the number “11” popping to the surface of my consciousness. I bet on 11 and it won the next race. After losing for days, I went on to bet correctly on six consecutive races. At that point I was feeling very tired, drained, and I realized that I was beginning to have doubts, to grope for the next number instead of just having it presented to me, and I went home.

To me, nothing less than a miracle had happened. But was it a one-time coincidence? No, it wasn’t. For ten days I returned to the track every night it was open and won almost every race I bet on, at least 8 out of 10. If I’d had more money, and had the confidence to risk a lot of it, I would have improved my bank balance tremendously, but my “reasoning mind”, that analytical monkey cage, regarded what was happening as impossible and so I remained in the cautious experimental stage.

There were three things I particularly noticed:

1. There was a definite feeling that distinguished a “real” number, a real precognition, from a merely imagined number. It was the sensation of a mild electrical shock at the very instant the number popped into consciousness. Without that sensation, I was just fishing.

2. The first impression was always the genuine one, even though it might pass so quickly as to be almost imperceptible. Any further impression was just a guess.

3. The winning number of the next race came to me most often at the moment the number of the winner of the present race was first flashed onto the electric board amid cheers and groans – mostly groans except when the favorite won.

I’m going to continue this in another post, but I’ll conclude for now by telling you that during the same period I went to the Jai Alai fronton on a few afternoons and had the same success, using nothing more than each number that floated up into my mind. I won no less than 5 out of 6. At both Jai Alai and the race track I never lost a bet when I really felt the electric “pop” as a number came to me. The few losers were due either to my not being “given” a number but betting anyway, or to my mentally searching for a number.


To be continued.