Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (45 page)

Man
needs
his powers of concentration, of focusing on the present and anticipating the future, in order to stay alive.
This is why, at some point in his history, he instinctively got rid of his ‘psychic powers’.
For the same reason, carthorses used to be blinkered to prevent them being distracted by the traffic.
David Morehouse’s accident, like Jane O’Neill’s and Peter van der Hurk’s, removed the blinkers, and made life suddenly far more nerve-racking.

It is probable that man began to get rid of his psychic faculties the moment he began to live in cities and had to pay more attention to bullock carts and jostling pedestrians than to predators.
The moment we begin to focus intently upon any important problem, our senses automatically begin to cut out ‘irrelevancies’, and in cities, psychic abilities were less important than commercial acumen.

The problem—as everyone must have noticed—is that, when we become narrow and obsessive, we end by cutting out far more than we intended, and end up with a rather bleak and depressing view of reality.
This is what has happened to our own civilisation.
Our narrowness no longer serves the function of allowing us to concentrate on survival—which, in any case, is hardly the prime concern of most well-protected city dwellers—but merely traps us in a kind of tunnel vision that deprives us of any wider sense of meaning.
It is probably true to say that there has never been a point in human history when humankind had a more depressing view of itself.

We need to change—that is self-evident.
But change to what?
Let me clarify the issue with another example.

In 1992, a Virginia publisher named Frank DeMarco received a typescript about the lives of Thomas and Martha Jefferson.
He was struck by its vividness, and wondered how the author had learnt so much about the couple’s relationship.
Finally, she admitted that she
remembered
being Martha Jefferson, adding, ‘You are free to regard me as a nut if you please’.

But DeMarco did not dismiss her as a nut.
He believed in reincarnation, and at college had repeatedly hypnotised two friends and recorded their own impressions of past lives.
And he suspected that he had also had glimpses of his own past lives, one of which involved a visit to Emerson at Concord.

DeMarco knew of Robert Monroe’s work, and had visited The Monroe Institute in 1990.
In 1992, he went there again, listened to tapes whose purpose was to sychronise the two halves of the brain, and recorded his experiences in his journal.

The instructor was a man called Joseph McMoneagle who, like David Morehouse, had worked for the military as a remote viewer.
[1]
Given geographical coordinates, he could send his mind to look at whatever they represented.

McMoneagle wrote coordinates representing latitude and longitude on a board, and the group was asked to relax and try to ‘view’ the place.
DeMarco did not succeed in remote viewing, but he suddenly felt that the coordinates represented the St.
Louis Arch.
He was certain he was wrong, for his own geography suggested that the place was in Kansas.
But, when a photograph was projected on a screen, it was the St.
Louis Arch.

In a later session, he began to have glimpses that he connected with Concord.
Having been there, he had no problem in visualising Emerson’s house.

It was not, he says, like imagining Emerson’s house, but like watching a movie.
He saw the scene and dialogue in completely realistic playback.
He went to the back door, and a maid went off to get Mr.
Emerson.
He seemed to hear Emerson address him as Dr.
Atwood.
In the dining room, he was introduced to Mrs.
Emerson, and formed clear impressions of her as a person.
He also sensed that she was gratified that her husband’s latest admirer regarded her as an individual, not merely as an adjunct of Emerson.

Thoreau arrived—he lived at the bottom of Emerson’s garden—and Atwood (DeMarco) felt he regarded him with a certain wariness, perhaps seeing him as a rival for the sage’s attention.
Atwood disliked Emerson’s rather proprietorial attitude to his wife.
Moreover, he felt he has seen her somewhere before.
Emerson proposed that they walk down to Walden pond before dinner.

At which point, the voice of their instructor brought DeMarco back to the room in 1992.
[2]

Now Jung had developed a therapeutic technique called ‘active imagination’, which involves visualising a scene so vividly that it takes on the ‘movie-like’ quality that DeMarco describes.
DeMarco’s experience may have been simply a kind of ‘active imagination’.
However, Monroe’s laboratory results, and his tests with three thousand subjects over a ten-year period, seem to indicate that it was probably more than that.
And some of DeMarco’s own experiences at The Monroe Institute seem to support that view.
He describes how, in a state of ‘Focus 10’ (body asleep—or deeply relaxed—and mind awake) he ‘took a walk’ down the corridor, down the stairs, and out of the door.
Looking at the moon, he thought, ‘I can go there’, then decided instead to go to California, where Kelly, the author of the book on Jefferson, lived.
Later, he received a letter from Kelly saying that she had seen him in her house.

There is strong evidence that the power of ‘psychic projection’ is more common than we generally suppose.
One of the first works sponsored by the newly formed Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s was a vast study called
Phantasms of the Living
by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, containing hundreds of examples.
One of the classic cases concerns a student named Beard who, with an effort of will, succeeded in ‘projecting’ himself to the house of his fiancée Miss Verity, so that he was seen there by Miss Verity and her sister.
Beard himself was unaware that he had succeeded; he was sitting in a chair in his own room, in a kind of trance.
Again, W.
B.
Yeats has described how, when he was thinking intently about delivering a message to a fellow student, the student suddenly saw him in his hotel hundreds of miles away, where Yeats delivered the message.
Yeats notes that he had no knowledge of ‘appearing’ to his friend.

There is a clear distinction between out-of-the-body experiences, remote viewing and ‘astral projection’.
The remote viewer remains in his body, fully aware of it, while his consciousness is elsewhere.
In OBEs, the body is left behind completely, connected only by some kind of psychic telephone line (Monroe was often drawn back by the need to urinate).
In ‘astral projection’, a kind of ‘double’ appears in another place, apparently sent by the unconscious mind, while the conscious mind usually remains unaware of what is happening.
The basic condition for this type of projection seems to be an intently focused imagination, which suggests that it has some connection with Jung’s active imagination.

Astral projection seems to depend upon some form of telepathy, or connection between minds.
One of Brian O’Leary’s Princeton colleagues, Robert Jahn, quotes Paracelsus: ‘Man also possesses a power by which he may see his friends and the circumstances by which they are surrounded, although such persons may be a thousand miles away from him at the time’.

Jahn is a professor of applied sciences at the Princeton School of Engineering, and his researches are central to this argument.
In 1977, a female student had asked him if he would oversee her project on psychokinesis—‘mind over matter’.
She wanted to know whether a random-number generator could be influenced by human mental effort.
Jahn at first refused, explaining that such experiments were not the kind of thing they did at Princeton.
Finally, he gave way, telling her that they would have to keep quiet about it.

Her results proved so startling that Jahn himself began to repeat the experiments.
These involved a machine called a Random Events Generator, in which binary pulses are generated by some random process, such as radioactive decay.
It might be regarded as a kind of electronic coin-flipper.
And if a coin is flipped often enough, the number of heads and tails will be equal.

Jahn, and his colleague Brenda Dunne, brought people in from the street and asked them to try to influence the coin-flipper to make it produce more heads than tails.
And the rate of success was amazing.
(The parapsychologist J.
B.
Rhine had conducted similar tests at Duke University, after a gambler came to his office, and told him he was able to influence the fall of the dice—a claim he went on to demonstrate as he and Rhine crouched on the floor of the office.)

Jahn and Dunne went on to study remote viewing.
In one experiment described in their
Margins of Reality,
one subject, labelled ‘Agent’, went to downtown Chicago, while another, labelled ‘Percipient’, stayed behind in a TV studio.

When Agent arrived downtown, a random-number generator selected one of ten envelopes that had been prepared earlier, each one containing a different location within a thirty-minute drive.
The target that was selected was the Rockefeller Chapel, on the campus of the University of Chicago.

Back in the studio, Percipient gave her impressions.
She saw the arcade next to the
Tribune
building, and a fountain with a statue.
She saw a building with turrets, and thin, long windows.
She saw a heavy wooden door with a black bolt.
It was, she felt, a church.
She described the inside and outside the Rockefeller Chapel in some detail, all of which proved to be accurate.

Now it may seem that this experiment is not about remote viewing so much as about telepathy between a sympathetic Agent and Percipient.
But there is an interesting twist.
Percipient gave her impressions of the chapel
an hour and a quarter before Agent arrived downtown and opened the envelope.
She was remote viewing the future.

But then, we may recall, David Morehouse was able to remote view the past—he had to travel back six years into the cockpit of the Korean airliner shot down by the Russians.
However, we feel somehow that this should not be too difficult—the past has happened, and left its traces behind, as in the Civil War Museum.
But to remote view the future sounds absurd.
Yet, as Jahn and Dunne point out, this is standard procedure in remote-viewing exercises carried out in many laboratories.

In other words, what Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne are doing is demonstrating under test conditions that human beings—many of them selected at random from outside the lab—possess precisely the same kind of powers that contactees ascribe to aliens.

What is even more strange is that this is not only true of human beings.
In another experiment, a random peanut dispenser was placed in a Californian forest, and the experiments found that skunks, raccoons and foxes, in search of peanut snacks, were somehow able to influence it even more strongly than their human test subjects.

I have suggested in
From Atlantis to the Sphinx
that our remote ancestors took ‘psychic powers’ for granted, and that one of the turning points in human evolution was the discovery of hunting magic, as portrayed in the caves of Cro-Magnon man.
This hunting magic, which almost certainly worked, gave man his first sense of control over nature and his own destiny.
I have also suggested that the religion of early man was based on the ‘collective unconscious’, and that it gave a tribe a kind of psychic unity—the same unity as is displayed by a flock of swallows who wheel simultaneously in the air, without any obvious signal, or a shoal of fishes turning all at once in the water.
Obviously, human beings in a modern city do not need that kind of unity.
In the past four thousand years or so, the individual has had to learn to stand alone.

There would obviously be no point in trying to return to that earlier stage.
But the kind of powers described by Robert Monroe and David Morehouse, and investigated by Robert Jahn in the laboratory, are a different matter.
It is fairly certain that our Cro-Magnon ancestors could not have out-of-the-body experiences at will, or remote view what a herd of bison was doing.
Such powers were almost certainly possessed by their shamans, but were as rare then as they are today.

What is necessary at this stage in our evolution is not a ‘return’ to the psychic powers of our ancestors, but an expansion of our own potential powers, based upon
the certain knowledge that such powers exist.