Why would we need to keep psi safely at a distance? Many of our social institutions require the assumption that it is possible to maintain control over information and keep secrets. Losing that assumption would require a total rethinking of our approach to daily interactions. Does the specter of ESP mean our lives are not private? Against our will, or without our knowledge, can others can gain telepathic access to our private thoughts and know our secrets? Although advocates of ESP do not usually mention this fact, it is there, nevertheless, as an undercurrent of concern. The anticipated loss of boundaries to ESP would be a concern at all levels of society.

The students expressed a fear of being confused by everyone's thoughts and feelings. They expressed a fear of not being able to distinguish their own thoughts from those of other people. There was fear of knowing things that they couldn't handle, such as perceiving other people's unspoken criticisms of them. Others mentioned feeling uncomfortable with the prospects of knowing the intimate details of people's private lives. They didn't know if they could refrain from condemning people for their weaknesses and they were sure they didn't want to be vulnerable to having other people knowing similar secrets of their own. ESP seemed to be a threat to what we protectively hide in shame. Judging from these students' responses, there does seem to be some element of fear concerning psi that parallels ambivalent feelings concerning intimacy.

ESP stimulates the fears we have about unwanted intimacy. Fundamentally, intimacy is a matter of boundaries. It's not just discussing vulnerable feelings, sharing secrets, or touching one another's body. Intimacy involves allowing someone to cross over a boundary. It's a boundary we've created as part of the developmental process of forming an identity as an individual self. Allowing someone into the inner regions allows that person to participate in our ongoing process of identity evolution. Inside that boundary we can experience wounds to our self-esteem. We use boundaries, therefore, to maintain privacy and to protect ourselves. The degree to which we suspend our boundaries and invite the other person inside them is the degree of intimacy we experience with that person. Is the suspension of personal boundaries, however, always under our control?

How can we fight the threat of uncontrollable intimacy that ESP suggests? Some people just outright deny ESP. It's one way of dealing with the problem. It's an example of the maxim, if you don't talk about it, it doesn't exist. Making a topic taboo is one way to magically make it disappear. It's about the only boundary we can create against the intimacy of ESP.

It can be frightening to lose the safety and security of one's boundaries. We assume that our actions stem from our own thoughts and feelings. It is frightening to consider the possibility that they may also be prompted by the subliminal, telepathic influence of other people's feelings. It is comforting to believe that the craziness that prompts a sniper to gun down children exists only within the boundaries of the madman's head. It would be disturbing to consider the possibility that the sniper is acting out the hatred and hostility that is "in the air" among us all. It's also disturbing to consider the possibility that the rest of us might be unconsciously infected by the sniper's anger. We like to think that we can set up barriers and keep a safe distance from other people's feelings. If acceptance of the reality of ESP casts doubts upon the reality of boundaries, we find ourselves in an extremely uncomfortable predicament.

Our fears that ESP might create unwanted intimacy are not unfounded. Our imagination touches on realistic aspects of psychic functioning. Let's briefly explore some of these actual connections between ESP and intimacy.

ESP Thrives In Intimate Relationships

Another threat to the bonds of intimacy is separation. It can happen through death or through estrangement. Couples or family members become separated through upset, argument, and strife and death. The feelings about these relationships go on, but there is no obvious form of communication.

The introduction of separation into a relationship can come from something other than death itself. Sometimes people outgrow one another, or other circumstances come between them. Whatever the source, separation can leave one member of that relationship bereaved. I'm familiar with several cases of estranged lovers having dreams that gave the impression that their relationship continued at a psi level.

Can we hide from our relationships simply by putting distance between us? Only a child can cover its eyes and assume that it has become invisible to its parents. Adam and Eve may assume they can hide from God by hiding in the bushes, but it's only an illusion created by their own separating consciousness. Out of sight may seem like out of mind, but estrangement spells separation only to the conscious mind, while the relationship may remain active within the unconscious mind. ESP thwarts breaking off an unfinished relationship or keeping ourselves separate from one another.

If you doubt the distant effects of thoughts, however, talk to someone who has children. Most any parent will testify that their children seem to be masters at picking up or reacting to the parent's thoughts and feelings.

It was not uncommon, for example, for the Schwarz children to suddenly make a comment aloud that seemed as if in direct response to something one of the parents was silently thinking. Imagine what it must have been like at the Schwarz house when the children's questions probed thoughts the parents were trying to keep to themselves. Most parents can appreciate such stories of embarrassing remarks made by children. Out of the mouths of babes comes such startling coincidental statements that make you cringe--are there no secrets? The way children can read minds suggests there may be another, much more common, motivator of ESP in the family than crises--secrets.

ESP Breaches Secrets to Restore Intimacy

Sometimes these secrets can be fun or exciting. A good example are planned surprises, such as presents. Children have an uncanny ability to guess their Christmas presents.

The reverse of peeking into secret delights is children's capacity to be alert to threats to the well-being of their parents. Parents often try to shield their children from their problems or worries, but the secrecy almost seems like a magnet to attract the child's attention.

Sometimes secrets consist of momentary feelings, such as anger, that the person doesn't feel comfortable about expressing. At a subconscious level, however, children and other family members may perceive the existence of such secret feelings as a threat to togetherness. That threat may motivate the use of ESP to breach the secret and restore intimacy.

Secrets may actually be the most prevalent stimulant to ESP. Although crises, such as deaths and accidents may be the largest known source of ESP, secrets may actually be an even more common, although unknown, unrecognized or unacknowledged provocation. What tipped me off to secrets and ESP is a story told me by a friend:

Don met his old flame Peggy at a business convention, and one thing led to another. Their reunion was quite delicious and Don was disappointed when he awoke from this dream. He had little time to savor the memory, however, because his wife woke up and muttered, "Don, honey, do we know anyone named Peggy?" The wife always knows, even when it's just a dream.

In relationships, secrets can be a form of lying. Keeping certain facts hidden can be a form of deception. It also is a barrier to intimacy. As a relationship is forming, and curiosity is high, such secrets may be especially vulnerable to detection.

I decided to go out on a search for examples, to see how hard it might be to find them. For my first attempt, I approached someone who I thought would have a number of ESP type coincidences to share. I asked her, "Have you ever had an experience where your children or spouse made an off the wall comment, or perhaps told you a bit of a dream, and you realized that they, without knowing it themselves, had tapped into a secret of yours that they seemed to be picking up on something that you wished they hadn't?" The woman looked at me, paused, then a stern look came upon her face. She said, "Yes, that happened to me once, with one of my daughters." As she blushed, she said, "But it is too personal to tell you about!"

Although this person gave me no story, her embarrassed reaction provided indirect encouragement for my idea. It suggested to me that there may be a large pool of personal experiences related to the exposure of secrets through ESP, experiences which may be suppressed, however, due to embarrassment. I placed a notice in Venture Inward magazine asking people to come forward with their stories, even anonymously, about ESP uncovering family secrets.

I quickly received over twenty letters in reply, not enough for quantitative analysis, but sufficient to provide a suggestive profile. Most letters concerned marital infidelities. The second most frequent category were adults having dreams about secrets their parents kept from them as children--I guess children never really grow beyond the ability to discover their parent's secrets. There were a couple concerning realizing someone was pregnant, or health concerns and a few miscellaneous topics, including two involving undetected murders! These few letters suggest that there are many such stories. The topic of secrets or deception exposed through ostensible ESP is probably worth a study in itself. Getting people to divulge such secrets, however, is no small trick. Often some embarrassment or shame is involved.

Extramarital contacts, for example, seem to be a sensitive source of telepathic coincidences. One woman wrote me about how she uncovered her husband's affair through dreams. She had a dream where he told her that he loved another woman. She woke up crying from the dream and her husband comforted her, assuring there was no basis to the dream. Later, however, he confessed. When he did so, he said to her the exact words she had heard him say in her dream.

Another woman wrote that one day a good friend phoned her, quite upset, and relayed this story: After eight years of marriage, she fell in love with her husband's brother. She kept these feelings to herself for a long time, but one day, the brother came over to the house and they had an intimate encounter. Within five minutes of their liaison, the phone rang. It was the woman's husband. He cried out over the phone, "Did you just make love to somebody?" The wife was overwhelmed with disbelief. All she could do was reply, "What?" The husband said, "I know this sounds crazy, but I just had this incredibly strong feeling that you were with another man." The phone call left the wife stunned and she picked up the phone and recounted the incident to her friend, confessing the whole story.

Coincidence: The Denial of Intimacy?

Many people who have encountered the types of coincidences we've explored here experience them to be expressing the direct connection they feel with their intimates. Sometimes their bodies react to the coincidences in dramatic ways, as if encountering a shock wave. One's hair stands up on end. There's a jolting feeling in the stomach. These people know in their hearts that these experiences are not "just" coincidences.

On the other hand, some of those people involved in intimate coincidences sometimes want to overlook the psychic bonding, because the emotional closeness causes enough consternation. They would prefer to dismiss these events as "just coincidence."

The Intimate Side of the Evidence for ESP

Not only are our own thoughts, feelings and daydreams not immune from intrusive telepathic influences, but also we can't tell when such an effect is occurring. It means that whether you wish it or not, whether you know it or not, there is always the possibility that at any given moment, you may not be alone in your own thoughts. If psychic images can't be distinguished from images from the imagination or memory, then you really can't tell when you are experiencing ESP. You can be subject to ESP effects without knowing it. What makes telepathy such an intimate experience is that it covertly enlists the cooperation of your own subjective responses to be the carrier of the effect, rendering the external as internal, thus making it impossible for you to find any gate to shut out the influence. What portal do you close to separate yourself from telepathic influence? Telepathy erodes the sense of distance and separation.

Laboratory ESP experiments can be somewhat boring. Who cares what picture that other person is looking at? Wouldn't it be more interesting to know how that person was feeling about being in the experiment in the first place, or how the experimenter feels about doing this kind of research? If I were in an ESP experiment, I certainly would have more curiosity about these more personal aspects than the formal targets that they use.

If our curiosity won't sit still and be content to think only about the ESP cards, if our curiosity can wander around the experimental situation itself, shouldn't our ESP be able to wander also? Who's to say that ESP will remain completely focused on the task at hand? Experimenters usually assume that ESP will remain tame and thus they are prepared to observe only the accuracy of our guesses with regard to the formal targets. This narrow focus misses something.

It happens quite often. Although the receiver is attempting to obtain impressions about the picture the sender is looking at, or the scene the sender is visiting, the receiver's ESP extends beyond those boundaries. The receiver may sense something about the sender's private life or may even pick up on something about one of the experimenters. In most published reports of these ESP experiments, such events are rarely reported. Probably only a fraction of them are ever detected, because the experimenter's focus is upon the statistical decision making with regard to the official target. The researchers may not recognize the unofficial target that is creating the receiver's impression. Also because these kinds of events cloud the issue, they are often discretely ignored. I learned of the story of the armed intruder by interviewing Honorton; it wasn't included as part of the published report.

Van de Castle revealed in a personal interview that there were other cases like this one in the Maimonides' experiments. He recalled another case of dreaming telepathically about one of the laboratory personnel. On one evening, he had a dream about the Northwest Mounted Police, a "regular Nelson Eddy musical," he said. The next day, he wasn't able to make any connection from this dream and the target pictures presented to him. As he discussed this dream with the staff, the night monitor looked embarrassed and confided that he had fallen asleep that night in the lab, and while asleep, dreamed of the Northwest Mounted Police. It's interesting not just that Van de Castle would pick up on this person's dream, but that its revelation would involve something of an embarrassment. The monitor made a small risk to job security in revealing the incident, yet made a contribution to the history of ESP.

Such telepathic dreams, ranging beyond the confines of the experimental target, can yield potentially embarrassing information. In his interview, Van de Castle revealed to me another example from the Maimonides experiments. It was a case where discretion would not allow the authors to include the incident in their reports or their book, to protect the individual involved. In this case, Van de Castle dreamed about a recent unfortunate incident in the personal life of the agent. The dream contained several relevant details concerning this incident. Because both Van de Castle's dreams and this person's name appears in the Dream Telepathy book, in fairness to this person, I can't disclose the nature of the secret Van de Castle's dreams exposed.

I would note, however, that here is an instance where were it not for my acquaintance with the subject, a telepathic event in an experiment would go unrecorded in order to protect someone's privacy. It is a relevant concern. ESP does violate privacy, and presents the participants in an experiment a quandary of whether or not to reveal the intimacies that ESP exposes. Ironically, it seems that it is the desire for intimacy that propels the ESP, while it is our fear of intimacy that keeps the ESP effect hidden. In both life and lab, ESP can make us too close for comfort, and the only way we can erect a barrier to this invasion is to deny or suppress the data of ESP.

ESP may excite our imagination, but it also raises concerns about loss of privacy, vanishing boundaries and uncontrollable intimacy. The facts, both from spontaneous cases and from laboratory research, show that these concerns aren't simply the product of our imagination. Issues of intimacy can truly impede both the public acceptance of ESP and the slowness of scientific advance in the parapsychology laboratory.

Perhaps we would do well to take the intimacy factor into consideration. If we can grapple with people's mixed feelings about intimacy, their both wanting to be close to others and their fear of closeness, perhaps we can make more progress into the exploration of ESP. A good place to start is by looking at the experience of two people becoming in close rapport.

Resonating: When You and I are One

If I feel like you feel when I empathize with you, if I feel your pain, enter your world, then it is as if I take on your characteristics. I become you.

Therapists have at times described this kind of event, using resonance as a term to explain this deep level of empathy that has psychic overtones.

She describes an instance when a new client came for her appointment. Larson had been practicing some relaxation exercises to prepare for this session and was quite serene when this woman arrived. Upon meeting her, Larson immediately began to experience some strange sensations in her body. While the interview proceeded, she watched these sensations, and observed them begin to localize in the abdomen. Finally, she described her sensations to the client. The woman immediately recognized what Larson was talking about--she had cervical cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.

From that moment on, at the recognition of the sympathetic sensation in the therapist, Larson and this woman enjoyed a deep bond and had a fruitful therapy experience. She said that the experience of resonance, as it began, made her think that she knew this person from the past. The sense of rapport was greater than she could explain.

This progression of closeness, as good as it might feel at times, may also sometimes be threatening. Listening itself can be risky. When we listen to music, for example, it has the capability of holding sway over us. We begin to tap our feet, to feel along with the rhythm. It's almost involuntary. Listening can be a form of surrender as it invites us to fuse with the object of our attention. Listening with rapt attention, experiencing empathy for another person's point of view can be threatening to the listener's own standpoint. Hiding behind the activity of listening, therefore, there lurks the possibility of merger, and thus concerns about being influenced, submission, surrender, obedience or compliance--the same concern about loss of control and confused identity that exists with telepathy.

Hypnotic suggestion raises the same concern for surrender and loss of control as does listening and, by extension, telepathy. Total listening can be hypnotic. Hypnotic inductions often include, in fact, instructions to simply listen, and not think about, the hypnotist's suggestions. To respond to a hypnotist's remarks as propositions to evaluate strips them of their suggestive power. Ceasing those rational activities and just listening, what the hypnotist is saying becomes very suggestive.

There is something basically threatening to our identity about listening. When we are little children, the sound of our parents' voice is a very compelling reality. As we listen to our parents, suggestible to their almost hypnotic remarks, we know no other reality. As we begin to develop some individual identity, however, we begin to evaluate what they say, to make our own decision about the validity of their remarks. When they say "Listen!" it seems that what they really mean is "Obey!" or "Agree!" Such an experience of forced compliance gives us a bad taste for the experience of listening, as if listening to our parents means we'll have to surrender our developing sense of personal reality. As adults we continue to suspect that if we don't hold on to our own viewpoint, or a critical posture, while we're listening, we're liable to become gullible to what the person is saying. We fear that we can be taken over as we listen. Empathizing, for example, with someone who is telling us something that we don't want to hear is very difficult. We erect defenses as we listen to such an offensive presentation, mentally repeating our objections to protect us from having our own position destroyed.

If empathy threatens surrendering to another viewpoint, then telepathy threatens a loss of the self's boundaries, a breech in the self's assertion of its own independent, autonomous reality. Whatever philosophical or scientific implications psi may have for the intellectual community, it is the loss of autonomy that makes telepathy such an emotional issue at the personal level.

Listening is a form of cooperation. It is the act of suspending one's own perspective for a moment and giving one's ear and attention to the viewpoint of another. What if we were to study telepathy, therefore, as an extension of listening and as an invitation to intimacy? Creating a context to encourage cooperation, asking people to listen to one another very closely for mutual gain, might provide a situation where they could become telepathic. Such a situation might provide us with an experimental context for dealing simultaneously with the issues of both intimacy and psi. Let me describe now exactly such a situation.

Getting to Know You: An Intimate Experiment

In Plato's Symposium, for example, Socrates recalls Aristophanes who said that one time long ago, we had four hands and four feet. We were round. But we were arrogant and the gods got upset with us. Zeus punished human beings.

"They shall continue to exist but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers... Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man having one side only like a flat fish, and he is always looking for his other half...and when one of them finds his other half...the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy.... The intense yearning which each of them has toward the other does not appear to be in the desire of intercourse but of something else which the soul desires and cannot tell, and of which she only has a dark and doubtful presentiment...."

The process of establishing intimacy needn't restrict itself to romantic or therapeutic encounters. Intimacy can also occur in fleeting moments of mundane interaction, as when someone catches your eye as you are preening in front of a mirror. Since telepathy has roots similar to that of our capacity for intimacy, it may play a role in our everyday experiences of close encounters. Parapsychological research might well take advantage of the intimacy motif in telepathic interaction.

When we first meet someone, for example, we quickly form many impressions. It's as if we immediately put out feelers to sense whether the other person vibrates to frequencies of our liking or familiarity. Part of the process of getting to know someone may have a psychic component. We have fantasies about a person, imagining their homes, their lives, or seeing them in various activities. Generally we do not share these fantasies with the person so we never have reason to suspect that much of what we experience about a person may be coming from unconscious impressions.

I've translated this spontaneous happening into an exercise for a small group activity. I present it at workshops as an exercise in intuitive communication. I call it the "Getting to Know You" game. It's a getting acquainted ritual, a structured group process, that provides for repeated opportunities to encounter the experience of unconscious communication, whether we wish to call this phenomenon resonance, telepathy or transpersonal empathy. It allows people to experience it intentionally and explore its meaning. This exercise may be the basis of a fruitful approach to studying people's handling of telepathic communication. Here is the method I use:

When people meet in small groups it's very common for them to introduce themselves, to say their name, where they're from, what job they do, and so on. In the Getting to Know You game, people introduce themselves in a very different sort of way. We dispense with the usual sharing of information and instead simply listen intently to the sound of one another's voices. The human situation is quite real and familiar: people are intently curious about the strangers gathered around them and wondering how they might relate to these people. The Getting to Know You game encourages people to use their natural intuitive ability to get acquainted while demonstrating many points about telepathic functioning.

Picture a small group of people, say six to eight, sitting around a circle. Each person in this group is going to take a turn introducing him or herself to the others. While the target person, or agent in traditional lingo, makes a vowel sound out loud in a prolonged, chanting fashion, everyone else imitates the sound: The agent tones a ten-second "Aaaaaahhhhhh..." and the rest of the group intones "Aaaaaahhhhhh..." at the same time. That's the tuning up phase. It's like the lead violin in the orchestra and all the other instruments are tuning to it. It's a way of having the group focus their attention on the sound of the target's voice in a room where there may be several competing voices and other noises. By imitating that voice sound, the group members are putting themselves into sympathetic vibration, both literally and figuratively, with the target.

Now that the group is tuned to the target person, that person provides a "voice sample" for the group to absorb. The sample consists of reciting aloud a standardized script. In early workshops the script asked the target person to recite the alphabet ("A, B, C, ..."), followed by the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go." In later workshops I changed the script to having the target person simply count backwards from forty nine (counting backwards from 99 gives more time, which some groups desire). In any case, it is important that each target person uses the same script. Because the voice sample always contains the same verbal content, group members don't have to pay attention to what the transmitter is saying. What's unique to listen to is the tone of the transmitter's voice. While the target performs the recitation, therefore, the rest of the group simply listens to the sound of the voice.

I reassure the group members that each person's experience will be different. Some people will see pictures, I explain, but not everyone will process the voice sample in terms of visual imagery. Some people simply have physical sensations. Others have feelings and impressions, or even urges. Some people see words flash before their mind's eye, while others find themselves thinking of things or being reminded of past experiences. I encourage people to simply accept the possibility that whatever they experience may very be related to something about the transmitter. The game helps people to learn to recognize the modalities by which they get intuitive impressions. In the course of receiving impressions from a number of transmitters they can start getting a feeling for the modality in which their intuitive impressions appear.

After the transmitter has completed the recitation, the people in the group describe what they experienced. I had instructed them to make a special effort to report their raw experience without interpreting it, judging it, or analyzing it first, but to simply describe what they experienced: "Well, while I listened to your voice I thought about the time I had to give a speech to the local Rotarian Club and how worried I was about choking up, and I had a mental image of my wife telling me not to be nervous, and I wondered if my mind was wandering too far from the task and was afraid I wasn't going to get anything correct impressions."

After everyone has shared their experience, the group reviews them to look for patterns. Were there any repeated themes? Did the people's impressions seem to be focusing in on a particular subject matter? If so, perhaps the group can make an inference about the person, or perhaps what the person had in mind while providing the voice sample.

Earlier in the instructions I had suggested that the target person might consider whether or not to focus on something specific while providing the voice sample. The target might want to think of something positive about their personal life that they'd like the others to know, perhaps a scene from home that reflects something interesting about themselves that makes them feel good. It's a way of saying, "This is something about who I am and what my life is like that's very important to me." Focusing on such a scene would put the person in an open frame of mind. It could also be a way to try to direct, or limit, what the listeners might tune into about the target person. I suggested that whether or not the target person intentionally focused on a specific mental scene, it might prove worthwhile to notice what thoughts transpire during the recitation, to serve as a frame of reference when considering the listeners' impressions.

The target person takes notes on the listeners' impressions. When everyone has presented their impressions or experiences, the target person goes over them one by one, responding to them. I encourage the participants not to let the game deteriorate into a test of "mind reading," but to use it as a getting acquainted tool. Listener's might associate to their own impressions to find out what they have in common with the target person. The metaphor of resonance, an image of two entities vibrating together on a common frequency, implies that a listener's impressions might pertain to areas where he or she has something in common with the target person. Thus I encourage them to explore the meaning of their impressions and not to leave it at simply whether or not the impression is a "hit" (to use a term from experimental parapsychology) with the target person.

Experiencing Psychic Intimacy

At the end of the exercise, during a discussion phase, I ask for a show of hands in response to this question: "Based on the what you observed happening among members in your group, would you say that the listener's experiences are accurately tuning into significant aspects of the target person's life?" There is a resounding response to this question, with almost all hands flying up. People are enthusiastic and amazed at what they were able to pick up and what their colleagues picked up about them. When I ask the next question, "Looking at the most accurate impressions, would you say that you witnessed any telepathy going on?" few hands go up, perhaps only about 10% of the audience. When asked why, the usual reaction is that telepathy is something that happens at a distance, not in a face to face encounter. If I use the word "psychic," meaning a direct mind-to-mind connection, then the majority (anywhere from 60 to 75%) of the people want to affirm that they've witnessed something "psychic." Whether or not psi is actually a factor in this game will be addressed later in the discussion.

As another context for presenting this exercise, I've developed a set of written instructions of the process and sent them to informal study groups who have tried it for themselves and sent me brief reports of the results. Their response was essentially the same as the audiences I directed in a first-hand fashion.

Based on this extensive experience, I present below some basic observations about the results provided by the game. In presenting this observations, I am suggesting that these same results should materialize were the reader attempt this game as a replication of an experimental procedure.

1) If a target person focussed on a particular scene, sometimes a group of listeners will have a collection of impressions that bear directly on that scene.

In one case, in a group in which I was participating, during the voice impression I got the sense of motion, of something going back and forth between two people, and a sense of expanse, like at the beach, and a feeling of wavy, like an undulating curving, like the waves at the beach, going back and forth, a ball going back and forth. And I see people throwing a ball back and forth at the beach, overlooking a fence, like a picket fence. Other people saw the ocean and children, a couple mentioned children, something with children. One person mentioned a drive, seeing the target person and her husband next to each other in the car, a long drive. The target person said the scene she was imagining was their beach house and her husband playing ball with the kids on the beach. It is a five hour drive there. The beach is strewn with sand-retention fences which look like picket fences.

In another case I observed, group members noted that their impressions had a lot in common, but they misinterpreted their impressions. One person described an image of the transmitter, a young woman, lying on her back spinning around. Two group members had images of the transmitter dancing and spinning, and both also saw flashes of bright yellow. Another person imagined himself spinning around in a circle and waving above his head some yellow ribbons, making them spin around in a circle like some kind of a child's toy. From these impressions, the group was convinced that the transmitter must have been contemplating some kind of dance performance with a yellow theme. The woman transmitter was contemplating an experience she had upon leaving her hometown to come to the east coast. As a good bye ceremony, she went for a swim in her favorite river. What she remembered was lying on her back and floating around in circles, sinking down under the water and seeing the sun shining through the water, creating a sensation of yellow light spinning and twirling above her. Incidently, someone else saw a Raggedy Ann doll. The woman said when she was a child she had a Raggedy Ann doll, and when she was leaving home, she realized she no longer had any of her dolls, and bought a Teddy bear to take on the trip east.

Here is another case, reported by a group member at a workshop: One group person said she had the impression of white, a "very crisp white." Another person thought about scenes of planes flying overhead. Someone else imagined a stage, as if witnessing some kind of performance. Another person reported seeing a scene involving education or a dedication. The group guessed that perhaps the woman was imagining something having to do with a graduation ceremony. In fact, she was reliving her recent experience at her son's induction day ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy. There were thousands of young people in white, with a fly over by jets as part of the graduation ceremony.

2) Percipients can't distinguish subjective experiences from objective, intuitive impressions

Sometimes I'll ask, for example, if anyone finds that they never seem to get any impression. A number of people report that they just get a "blank" when they try to tune into the voice. I find these people instructive to interview. For example, one woman said "I didn't get anything again, only just the word "commitment'." I tease her a little bit, saying "Just the word commitment? You're assuming that your impression should be visual, aren't you? How do you know but maybe the word commitment has some meaning." Later when we heard from the target person, we learn she was recalling an important incident in her life where she had been nursing her sister back to health and as she had agonized over the process of doing so, she had found that her sense of commitment to her sister in the process of helping her was something that was very important to her. She was very surprised when this woman had as an impression the word, "commitment." She said her body responded to that word as if the word touched the essence of her experience. The woman who thought she had received nothing had in fact received a very important message.

3) The percipient's raw experience is usually more accurate than their interpretation of their experience.

I once witnessed the following exchange between a listener and the target person: The listener said to the target person, "You are a person who is striving to stay in control!" The target person replied, "I don't know if I like that characterization." I asked the listener, "What did you actually experience?" The listener answered, "While listening to his voice, I felt my shoulders and neck tightening up." I asked her if she had ever experienced that before. She indicated she had, during periods when she was anxious and was trying to stay in control of her feelings or a situation. She supposed that was why she had guessed the target person was a "controlling person." The target person was now excited and broke in to the conversation, exclaiming, "I'm always having trouble with stiff shoulders and have a sore neck right now. Are you saying these problems come from an attempt to always be in control?" The target person had changed his tone when his attention had been directed away from being judged to the subject of sore shoulders. The listener had experienced the resonant listening described earlier by Larson but didn't have the skill to use it effectively. Nevertheless, there was a definite tuning in to the target person that the target person found meaningful.

The intervention of rational processes may interfere with the psi mechanism, depending upon whether or not it occurs during the reception stage or only during the reporting of one's experience. I've witnessed within myself what many listeners have noted themselves, namely that they can only report a portion of their experience, because they don't know how to put words on it. As they hear other listeners report their experience, they find themselves nodding in agreement because another person's report will match some aspect of their own subjective experience which they were unable to verbalize. The non-verbal aspects of much of the subjective impression may be a source of the under-detection of psi hitting. I've found some other sources of under-detection beyond the stimulus error.

4) Both percipients and agents sometimes suppress information relevant to a finding for ESP when unwanted intimacy would result from the disclosure

Many percipients who say they get "nothing" actually are getting impressions that they'd rather not share. I've had percipients come up to me and say that they simply had to tune out a person, because they simply could not tolerate the hostility, for example, in the person's voice. Others have confided that they sensed tragedy or trauma in the person's life, and didn't think it wise to mention it. Sometimes these percipients just can't get these ideas out of their minds. They become "infected" with the other person's emotional state or obsessed with aspects of what they assume to be the other person's life.

Another source of suppression of the reporting of experiences among percipients is embarrassment. When I survey participants to see if any had impressions they didn't share because of embarrassment, many people confess to having held back material. One man joked that he felt an attraction for one of the female group members and it was clear from other people's reactions that he expressed feelings that many could recognize. Sexual attraction is an area of intimacy that excites a great deal of mixed feelings.

At one conference, a woman reported that she had an impression during the voice sample that was so grotesque that she was ashamed to report it for fear of being judged "sick" by the group. She said that since the group had specifically discussed the ideal of sharing everything, she reluctantly decided to go ahead and tell of her impression. It was of being in a corn field and reaching down and picking up an ear of corn that had a strange appearance to it. It had warts and strangely colored growths all over it. She felt that perhaps the image reflected some kind of distorted phallic feelings on her part and didn't want to share it. When she did reveal the image, however, the target person, a young male turned quite pale. He explained that he lived across the road from a corn field and the week before he had walked among the rows. There he came upon an ear of corn that had colored growths all over it. He was bothered by what he saw, not understanding that it was not that uncommon example of a particular type of blight. The woman and he were both flabbergasted that she would pick up on this particular experience. The woman said that she was still quite shaken by the event and, to quote her exactly, "...to think that I almost didn't say anything because of feeling embarrassed...."

The target person too may suppress information that would otherwise validate a listener's impressions because to do so would be anxiety provoking, or there is information that can't be revealed. At one conference, I received an anonymous note from a woman confiding that someone in her group hit a nerve that made her clam up. She wrote that although no one picked up on the exact scene that she was imagining, one woman said the word "infidelity" came to her. Hearing this word shocked the transmitter, she wrote me, as she had just returned from a trip with a man other than her husband. She believed that the one group member had tuned into her secret affair. If so, then here was an example of the need to suppress the exposure of a secret causing evidence of a possible psi effect to be itself suppressed. It is exciting to imagine just how often this effect may occur, but frustrating to suspect that the evidence will never come to light. Even in the innocent "Getting to Know You" game, there can be potentially dramatic moments of unexpected and unwanted intimacy.

5) Percipients have accurate impressions that go beyond the boundaries of the agent's specific focus and sometimes touch on personal facts of intense emotional significance.

Many people noted that when they were the target person, they would consider and then reject certain scenes as potential images upon which to focus. The listeners, they reported, didn't provide impressions relevant to their chosen image, but rather to one that they had decided not to use.

In one interesting case the group members' impressions seemed to coincide with the theme of travel. I was in that group and I first received an impression of a small boat rocking in the sea, and the sense of a sail. But then the scene shifted and I was waiting at a train station where I see a train locomotive arrive. From small boat to train station made me think of travel. Another person saw the vertical tail fin of an airplane. A third imagined walking on a moving sidewalk in an airport. One person saw the color pink while another had the impression of the transmitter carrying a pink parasol while walking about a foreign country among some strange shaped building. The last person saw the transmitter working in the kitchen, tidying up a small little girl, and with the feeling "If I could just stop time now, this is a perfect moment." The transmitter, a woman, said she was thinking about her trip to Egypt, which was a very special experience for her. She carried a pink sun umbrella around while there because it was so hot. She noted that prior to deciding to focus on that experience, however, she thought about her first boat ride, where she caught a sail fish, and thought it was interesting that one person seemed to pick up on that scene, even though she had rejected it. The person who saw the upright tail fin wondered if she was seeing the sailfish. The transmitter then confided that the impression that made the greatest impact on her had nothing to do with her trip to Egypt. She said that the mention of the young girl in the kitchen hit her in the heart and made her want to cry, because of a painful aspect of her life right now, involving her grown daughter who had moved back to live with her following a divorce. The man who had that impression mentioned that he was himself back home living with his parents after years away and was going through an intense period of getting reacquainted.

On another occasion when I was a listener I experienced an impression of a white woven blanket, like a cotton blanket, or perhaps something like a quilt, and the sense of white creamy milk being poured out, then a rocking, like in a nursery for a young child, then saw knives, which shook me, then a woman observing or supervising men work on a house, putting shingles on the roof and painting the exterior walls. Then I saw a scalpel approach a pregnant belly and draw slowly across it, cutting it softly and smoothly like butter. Someone else saw mother and child, and another saw a child. Another saw youngster's lips with red all around them. Someone saw a glass of bourbon. A soft carpet covering an expanse of floor. A sense of fluidity and giving in to the flow. The target person had been focusing on that morning's intimate moment with her young daughter, who climbed into bed with her and they lay there cuddling. On the bed is a white woven blanket and a quilt. Then their happiness was interrupted as mother found herself upset over her daughter's continued use of a pacifier. It has caused a red rash around her lips and mouth. One woman had a headache during the exercise and said she was having a similar separation issue with her daughter and with her mother too. I suggested that the image of a Caesarian delivery is one of premature separation of mother and child. The person who had the image of a glass of bourbon said it reminded him of a pacifier, using drink to pacify oneself. Here an underlying emotional conflict experienced by the target person seemed to come across to some of the group members in symbolic terms related to the group members own experiences.

6) Group vary in how intimate they become and the degree of intimacy achieved seems correlated with reports of apparent ESP.

Some groups are quite shy, or the composition of the group is such that there doesn't seem to be much interest among the people in getting close. Or there may be too much attraction to tolerate. Whatever the source of this fear of intimacy, I've noticed one dynamic a group uses to deal with the problem. They progress through the game quite rapidly. They share impressions in a brief and perfunctory manner. Lacking curiosity about their interconnections, there is little follow through discussion, beyond a routine assessment of "hits" and "misses." They invariably report that there was very little that might suggest ESP and also don't report anything suggestive that they got well acquainted. It seems that the game itself makes them feel too close for comfort.

By way of contrast, other groups embrace their opportunity to become acquainted and experience profoundly moving connections that cement their bond. In this instance, when asked about the occurrence of any apparent telepathic effects they describe many. It is notable, however, that in contrast to the low intimacy groups, whose reports focus on the external details of how their impressions didn't match the target person, the high intimacy group doesn't stress so much the great number of apparently telepathic connections they observed so much as they report the content of their connections and what they are learning from one another about those issues of mutual concern. It is as if the psi mechanism has become "transparent" and no longer the focus compared to the meaningful emotional exchange it provides.

Can We Discuss Telepathy Face to Face?

The informal observations made in conjunction with the "Getting to Know You" game are in keeping with the theme of our exploration of intimacy and psi. All of the relationships, in fact, between the psychology of intimacy and the functioning of telepathy proposed during the first part of this paper were apparent in the participants' responses to the game. Before discussing these further, it may be prudent first to discuss the issue of whether or not psi was present in the game.

The participants themselves were reluctant to accept that the connections they experienced were due to telepathy. The reason was that they were sitting face to face and the connotation of telepathy is the passing of information over a distance with no sensory contact. The traditional parapsychological approach to telepathy is to physically isolate the participants, for the telepathic hypothesis is usually regarded as communication with no sensory involvement. The purpose is to be able to isolate the presence of telepathy from the presence of other factors potentially contributing to the possibility of communication. Using this traditional standard, the game is not capable of demonstrating telepathy.

The majority of participants did believe, however, that they had witnessed a "psychic" interchange, meaning a direct, mind-to-mind connection. The impressions people had about the voice agent went beyond mere speculation about the personality characteristics of the speaker. They included many examples of the person's home environment, conditions at work, and other things that went beyond mere impressions. In response to these surprising coincidences they reported having tell-tale bodily sensations, such as the hair standing up on the back of the neck, "gut" wrenching recognitions, blushing, and other physiological indicators of experiencing being seen, or recognized in a surprising and meaningful way. These experiences were often described as "uncanny."

If we may be permitted to grant that a psi component may be present in this game, although unproven at this moment, we can briefly review how the presence of apparent psi relates to the intimacy factors discussed earlier in the paper.

Second, in order for a participant to be successful in this game, he or she must avoid the "stimulus error." The apparent psi connections occur in the subjective experiences of the listener and not in the listener's interpretation of these experiences. The reporting of raw experience is more intimate, however, more threatening, than making an attribution about the target person. To report one's raw experience is more revealing of self and one is more open and vulnerable. It is a more intimate disclosure than to state a judgment about the target person. Yet in most instances of free response ESP testing, such as the Ganzfeld, for example, the flow of raw, subjective experience is clearly where the psi information is to be found, because the subject would rarely be able to identify properties of the stimulus from the introspective material. Thus, if revealing raw experience is more intimate than making attributions about the target stimulus person, then we see here that intimacy would become a mediator of the psi response.

Another example of boundary violations concerns secrets. One case of a secret being potentially exposed was confidentially reported suggesting the present of other examples which were not reported. As a final boundary issue, it was hard to maintain a distinction between what was strictly internal and subjective and what was external and objective. That one's seemingly personal, subjective experience might be invisibly shaped by someone else's thoughts or feelings, as if there were a direct but subliminal mind-to-mind influence, was disturbing to some people. Participants spoke of an identity confusion, similar to the students in Tart's survey who worried that if they were to become telepathic, they wouldn't be able to discern their own thoughts from those of people around them. Participants express this concern sometimes by asking how they could "protect" themselves from picking up unwanted thoughts or feelings.

Fourth, when listener's impressions touched on surprising areas of the agent's personal life, there was often a sense of connection being made between listener and agent. This overlap is a direct result of the fact that psi operates within the listener's subjective impressions, responses which necessarily have a projective component. If the subjective component does have a recognized objective aspect, that is, if the target person can recognize him or herself in that impression, then there will be an overlap between the personal meaning for the listener and meaning for the target person. The apparent psi functioned, therefore, to establish and enhance intimacy, allowing the participants to discuss matters of mutual intense interest.

Finally, let's consider the intimacy factor operating within the methodological considerations of the experiment. We are not accustomed to think of the face to face exchanges such as in this game as relevant to telepathy, because the people aren't physically separated. So much of ESP research is geared toward proving the supposedly impossible contention that thoughts can be communicated at a distance that the research situation is usually sterilized to remove any contact or relationship between the two parties. One just wouldn't consider telepathy when the two people can see or hear one another, because we would assume that the communication could be mediated by the sounds and sights.

Is this restriction strictly a matter of the logical requirements for deducing the psi factor? Could it be, perhaps, that the reality of telepathy is too frightening to acknowledge when two people are face to face? Perhaps it's more comfortable to think about mind-to-mind communication when there is a great distance separating the people. Perhaps when we define telepathy as communication in the absence of sensory contact we do so not just on logical grounds, but partly to keep telepathy at a comfortable distance. Perhaps it becomes too threatening an arena for exploration, suggesting interpersonal merger, of one person flowing into one another, of ultimate intimacy, should we trade in our distancing metaphor, "tele-pathy" (feeling at a distance) for something like "transpersonal empathy," where we might expect to witness direct communication through the unconscious mind.

Intimacy and telepathy may be natural partners. In situations of intimacy, people will describe feeling "close" to the other person. This closeness is more than a physical closeness, but is a psychological closeness. The parties actually feel the presence of one another within themselves. To observe this phenomenon of psychic closeness, the participants must introspect rather than observe outward events. The psi factor of telepathy similarly operates from within the parties involved. It doesn't arise at the sensory portals but arises from within. The internal experience of the psi factor, reflected in the startling coincidence of subjective and objective, creates the feeling of a bond between the two parties. This psychic bond may extend to situations where the parties are physically separated and the intimacy previously established now serves as a channel for more clear-cut telepathic phenomena. Although the physical separation makes the telepathy aspect more distinctive, the process of the intimacy connection between the two parties remains the same internal reality of "feeling close."

Because it lacks any such physical separation, the Getting to Know You game lacks the experimental controls necessary to allow answering the usual parapsychological question concerning the existence of psi independent of all sensory channels. One way to achieve greater control in the experiment, for example, would be to limit listener contact with the target to strictly the auditory channel. The experimenter might present the listener with an audio-tape of the agent's voice to prevent the presence of visual cues. To make the target material less vague, the agent would write down in advance exactly the personal scene to be focused upon during the recording of the voice sample. Independent judges could be asked to attempt to match transcripts. Training in the game could be used as a precursor to a remote viewing experiment, to test whether the experimental intimacy and apparent psi would carry over into a situation of physical separation. The reader might think of many other refinements that would increase the rigor of the experiment. On the other hand, as the focus changes from encouraging people to become acquainted as intimately as possible (although through experimentally constricted means) to challenging people to demonstrate a technical feat, the intention of the experiment drastically changes.

Since it's difficult for a researcher to legislate intimacy, we may be touching on a human factor that makes it difficult to gain rigorous scientific control over the significant events in parapsychological experiments. Whether it concerns intimacy or telepathy, if the experiment demands, "Be intimate!" or if the evaluation focuses itself narrowly, "Was this really telepathy?" the closeness experienced between the participants begins to evaporate. Telepathy and intimacy share the paradoxical quality that when you focus on them, they disappear.

Perhaps another approach may be necessary. Moving the locus of our research, away from trying to prove that extra-sensory communication can occur, to trying to find ways of helping people who are motivated to exchange information to communicate effectively under a context of restricted channels of communication might provide results of some utility.

Although not an experiment in the traditional sense of the word, as there were no controlled manipulations, nor was there any attempt to make quantified observations, the game does has a structure in the same way an experiment is a structured situation. They both present standardized situations that focus the participants' attention and shape how the participants behave. In this manner they both enable us to make repeatable observations of the participants' responses. Unlike most experiments, however, the game offers many of the advantages of the non-experimental approaches.

As a training activity, the game has sufficient value to participants that they are willing to fund its presentation. In an era of declining resources for parapsychological research, it seems significant that there are nevertheless great numbers of individuals who are interested in learning how to use and apply a phenomenon which most of them believe they have experienced and which experimental parapsychology has proven exists. Can parapsychology take these people onto the next stage of exploring psi or will we abdicate?