Category: spirituality

Telepathy (from the Greek τηλε, tele meaning “distant” and πάθη, pathe meaning “affliction, experience”), is the transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the “five classic senses” (See Psi). The term was coined in 1882 by the classical scholar Fredric W. H. Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, specifically to replace the earlier expression thought-transference. A telepath is a person with the paranormal ability to read others’ thoughts and mental contents. Telepathy is one kind of extrasensory perception which, along with psychokinesis, forms the main topics of parapsychological research. Many studies seeking to detect, understand, and utilize telepathy have been done within this field. This research has neither produced a replicable demonstration of telepathy, nor an accepted mechanism by which it might work. Hence the scientific community does not regard telepathy as a real phenomenon. It is hard to unambiguously distinguish telepathy from a number of other parapsychological hypotheses such as clairvoyance.

Although not a recognized scientific discipline, people who study certain types of paranormal phenomena such as telepathy refer to the field as parapsychology. Parapsychologists claim that some instances of telepathy are real. Skeptics say that instances of apparent telepathy are explained as the result of fraud, self-delusion and/or self-deception and that telepathy does not exist as a paranormal power.

Parapsychologists such as Dean Radin, president of the Parapsychological Association, argue that the statistical significance and consistency of results shown by a meta-analysis of numerous studies provides evidence for telepathy that is almost impossible to account for using any other means. (read more)

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of “synthetic telepathy.” But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains:

The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would “think” a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target. (read more)

Ingo Swann (born Ingo Douglas Swan on 09/14/1933 in Telluride, CO) is an artist and author, best known for his work as a co-creator (according to his frequent collaborators Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff) of the discipline of remote viewing, specifically the Stargate Project. He has written several books on remote viewing or related topics.

Swann does not identify himself as a “psychic,” preferring to describe himself as a “consciousness researcher” who had sometimes experienced “altered states of consciousness.” Swann has stated, “I don’t get tested, I only work with researchers on well-designed experiments.” Swann is dissatisfied in a role as a passive subject. He feels he must contribute to the preliminary design of the research. According to Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, there have been “Swann-inspired innovations” that have led to impressive results in parapsychology. Experiments not controlled by Swann have not been very successful. These are rarely mentioned, and if so, only in passing.

Swann helped develop the process of remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute in experiments that cauught the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. He is commonly credited with proposing the idea of Coordinate Remote Viewing, a process in which viewers would view a location given nothing but its geographical coordinates, which was developed and tested by Puthoff and Targ with CIA funding. Due to the popularity of Uri Geller in the seventies a critical examination of Ingo Swann’s paranormal claims was basically overlooked by skeptics and historians. Uri Geller comments very favorably on Ingo Swann. Geller says, “If you were blind and a man appeared who could teach you to see with mind power, you would revere him as a guru. So why is Ingo Swann ignored by publishers and forced to publish his astounding life story on the Internet?” Both Geller and Swann were tested by two experimenters, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, who concluded that Geller and Swann did indeed have unique skills. However, others have strongly disputed the scientific validity of Targ and Puthoff’s experiments. In a 1983 interview magician Milbourne Christopher remarked Swann is “one of the cleverest in the field.” Details and transcripts of the SRI remote viewing experiments themselves were found to be edited and even unobtainable. (read more)