Psychoenergetics

By William Hamilton III

            With the release of the motion picture What the Bleep do We Know? A new scientific paradigm has caught the attention of the public.  Now a book is coming out by the same name.  This has reversed the usual sequence of development in which a movie is usually based on some book.  Now we will have a book based on a movie.  The movie and the book are designed to stimulate an individual to re-think the nature of their daily reality.

            ” With the help of fourteen leading quantum physicists, scientist and spiritual thinkers, this book guide readers on a course from the scientific to the spiritual, and from the universal to the deeply personal. Along the way, it asks such questions as:

· Are we seeing the world as it really is?

· What are thoughts made of?

· What is the relationship between our thoughts and our world?

· Are we biologically addicted to certain emotions?

· How can I create my day every day?

The answer to the last question is a resounding yes: you are an infinite set of possibilities, and you can choose every day which reality you want to create for yourself. This book shows you how.”¹

From my own experience and studies I can say that the world as we see it, our perception of the world, is rooted in our beliefs and the impressions made upon us by sensory stimuli, but does not tell us the truth about the nature of reality and that is a question that is important when we have two dichotomies in the metaphysics of common people.   To the university trained scientist who has been steeped in the philosophy of naturalism, there are only material causes and the universe is a mechanical entity that has material causes and effects to be verified by senses or artificial sensing, measurements, and observations made under strictly controlled conditions.  On the other hand is the seminary trained minister who has been taught that God made the universe and God is spirit who created the universe as a thought with a plan for both the universe and humankind.  The minister teaches us that there is hope through belief in an afterlife and the scientists say there is only hope through technology and life extension.  Neither point-of-view is represented by the motion picture.  We have; instead, an idea born of the synthesis of discoveries is quantum physics, consciousness, and a westernized version of eastern philosophy such as we find in Asia, and especially India and Tibet.

            A few scientists have investigated claims of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis and more recently those extraordinary practices known as remote viewing and remote influencing.  The thousands of hours spent in laboratories by Dr. J.B. Rhine and others have still failed to convince the broader scientific community of the reality of ESP, much less a reality that transcends the physical. 

            We have also seen a greater interest in near-death and out-of-body experiences.  These NDEs seem to verify the existence of a spiritual component in humans that survives the death and disintegration of the body, a conclusion so anathema to the naturalist that he or she will go to any length to find an alternative explanation for such reports even if it seems to stretch known facts. 

            I had an early interest in ESP when as a teenager I haunted the public library in Alhambra, California and searched for any book on the subject that I could find on the shelves.  As with other readers, reading one book led to an interest in another book or related topic.  As I navigated my way through puberty I started having extraordinary experiences of my own.  I saw beautiful lights that would appear and drift across the room.  These always seem to have the purest colors.  I saw one of these that looked like an iridescent bubble drift right by my Aunt who was seated in a chair watching television and took no notice of it.  Were some people blind to these lights?  I wondered and thought about it.  I started to see colorful emanations around the shoulders of family and friends.  I then read everything I could find about the human aura.  Later, I started to receive telepathic messages and wrote in strange script.  Then I apparently made contact with UFOs that flew by my aunt’s house where I lived as a boy.  All of this lasted through my high school years and started to fade as I matriculated at a local university to study psychology rather than the engineering I was fond of in order to become a parapsychologist.

            Joining the Foundation for Research in Parapsychology in 1960, I had the opportunity of flying with my new friend John McCoy to an ESP lab in Carmel, California run by a Dr. Andrija Puharich, the founder of the FRP.  I was impressed with Puharich and his lab.  He had a large Faraday cage that you could sit inside of and test for ESP and PK effects.  There was a beat oscillator hanging from the ceiling inside the cage.  He said that a Kahuna from Hawaii was tested inside the cage which minimized electromagnetic transmissions from being transmitted or received once a high voltage was applied to the walls of the cage.  He said that the Kahuna could “turn on” the beat oscillator, change its frequency up and down the spectrum, and turn it off all by the power of “intention”.  It seemed incredible.  If I could do this I should be able to change channels on my television set with the power of mind alone.

            One apparatus that fascinated me and Purharich used in conjunction with scientifically testing psychic Peter Hurkos was another oscillator, a variable frequency oscillator that could be controlled by any operator as the operator donned taped-over goggles and stared into a strobing light that changed in frequency set by the controls on the oscillator.  I sat down and proceeded according to instructions and as I raised the strobes frequency geometric figures and colors started to appear within the field of vision.  These changed with increasing stroboscopic frequency and were entrancing.  According to Puharich, Hurkos would stare into the strobe and eject from his body and soar above the Carmel Valley reporting back what he could see from a bird’s eye view.  Then Purharich would compare descriptions of known targets with Peter’s report.  According to him, Hurkos always seemed to be able to see accurately from his OOB viewpoint.

            Despite under funding and lack of support new investigations are proving we can influence physical states of reality with human intention.  Is this magic?  Such statements do not set well with those who have staunchly maintained their philosophical indoctrination of scientific naturalism and emotional reactions to such scientific results is quick to come.

            Dr. William Tiller is a pioneer in the field of psychoenergetics, a field that I would consider a subset of psychophysics.  Tiller has performed some amazing experiments that will only be alluded to here in this short essay so I would encourage the reader to read his books even though some of his books have heavy mathematical treatment.  I consider he is a leader in creating a new scientific paradigm, one that actually embraces body, mind, and spirit as the greater reality and the psychoenergetic interactions of consciousness with matter.

            Quoting Tiller from his paper on Conscious Acts of Creation:

“Today, we once again have abundant experimental evidence concerning nature’s expression that is being “swept under the rug” by the scientific establishment because it doesn’t fit into the current prevailing paradigm. This concerns the issue of whether or not human qualities of spirit, mind, emotion, consciousness, intention, etc., can significantly influence the materials and processes of physical reality. The current physics paradigm would say “no” and indeed there is no place in the mathematical formalism of the paradigm where any human qualities might enter.  However, the database that supports an unqualified “yes” response is very substantial [1-10].  This article is dedicated to illustrating to this readership both why, from a scientific perspective, the “yes” response is the correct one and, briefly, what some of its implications are for philosophy, religion and technology. ²

In concluding, I would like to enumerate some of the postulates I have devised after 40 years of thought on the subject.  I call this line of thought Cybernoetics but it is mainly a non-naturalistic philosophy rooted in non-material ideas.

Premise:  Mind, life, and the universe can be modeled synthesizing concepts from cybernetics, information theory, systems theory, elements of eastern and western philosophies and sciences.

Postulate Alpha:  The primary source of existence is an undifferentiated, unviewable, and unconditioned being of no dimension.  This source will be designated Alpha.

Postulate Beta:  Alpha creates and uncreates existences by intention and imagination.  Existences are characterized by quantum states of binary information occurring in pairs of opposites.  Existences are also characterized by dimensionality.  That which cannot be measured exists in virtual states of potentiality.

Postulate Gamma: Alpha and Beta continually interact.  This interaction gives us time, space, and energy.  This interaction is in terms of communication and control.

Postulate Delta: Alpha assumes beingness in a virtually infinite number of entities that retain the basic qualities and capacities of Alpha, which are three in number: 

Awareness, Intentionality, and Intelligence.  An entity will be designated as a Psichon.

Postulate Epsilon: Life is an interaction involving creation, control, information, organization, and exchange of energy through time and space between Psichons and Psichons and the physical universe.

Postulate Zeta:  Life can exist in free states or bound states. Life is impelled toward free states of maximum power, intelligence, understanding, knowledge, and joy and is repelled from bound states of stupidity, unawareness, non-comprehension, ignorance, and depression.  

Awareness is a basic state of being.  It manifests itself as perception.  Perception can occur with attention to feedback and modifies states of awareness. 

Intentionality manifests itself in communication and control and can effect cycles of creation, change, and uncreation. 

Intelligence manifests itself as computational processing of information in terms of perception and feedback and decisions that modify actions and conditions of action.

 Actions are in terms of self-initiated actions, self-control, or reaction to feedback.

I found this very relevant article concerning the role of INTENTION in life…

Foundation for Mind-Being Research Editorial

Speculations About PK

Evidence that intention or purpose plays an important, perhaps a dominant role in the way the universe runs has been piling up to such an extent that I feel relatively safe in climbing out on a limb with a few speculations.

First, let me describe some of this evidence which seems so compelling to me. There is the anthropic principle which states that the universe itself is organized and constructed in such a way that people--conscious observers--are an inevitable product of its evolution. This idea which is linked with the physics of elementary particles as well as "big bang" cosmology is both beautiful and awesome in its implications.

The placebo effect is another kind of phenomenon which pushes me in the general direction I am trying to describe. Here the belief in the efficacy of a certain medicine seems to have a powerful influence on the body's response to that medicine. And along this same line, the current popularity of imagery and visualization extending even to the world of sports and athletics suggests that more and more people are catching on to the idea that planting the right thought or picture in the subconscious is the key to the programming of the body for a desired behavior.

Finally I would mention the mass of data that has emerged from studies on psychokinesis (PK). Micro-PK research, such as with random event generators, has shown that thought or intention is weakly but measurably coupled to atomic or quantum-level systems. Macro-PK studies, whether they be informal spoon-bending at "PK parties" or carefully instrumented work in the laboratory, suggest that the release of relatively large amounts of physical energy can be triggered by thought power.

Now one more piece of information from physics before I climb out on that limb. There is a rule governing the behavior of physical systems called "Hamilton's Principle of Least Action." Action is defined as the product of energy and time, and the Principle of Least Action simply states that when a system undergoes some kind of change it chooses a path along which this product has a mathematical minimum (assuming influences from outside the system are negligible). I won't get into the question about how the system "knows" that the path taken is indeed one of minimum action. I want to emphasize, however that the principle has been found to be valid for both large scale (classical) systems and small scale (quantum) systems.

Now I would like to pull these ideas together and see what can be made of them. First I need to make a couple of simple assumptions: (1) "Thought" takes place at a different level than the physical (call it "mind") but interacts with the physical through a weak coupling between physical energy and a more subtle energy form. (2) The physical level operates in accordance with natural law (Hamilton's Principle) except at the times when thought interacts with it.

Note that (1) is an attempt to clarify the term "psychokinesis". (Naming a phenomenon does not explain it!) It is suggesting that the mind-matter connection is nothing more or less than PK. Some readers may see in (2) some similarity to "Feynman diagrams" and this is precisely the image I wish to evoke. An analogy can be made to a billiard ball (physical system) rolling in a straight line until a cue stick (thought) interacts with it and sends it in a new direction. An interaction point is sometimes called a "vertex."

Using this model it is immediately evident that we run our bodies by PK. From fetal stage on, we have been learning and practicing this skill. Whether finger wiggles or healings, the same process links thought to substance. Intention dictates the direction; physics and chemistry take it from there. And this goes for getting sick, too. If the mind suggests anything other than perfect health to the body, the body will obediently cooperate with the "intent" and proceed along a path of least action (or minimum energy) until the next vertex. The path taken may correspond to whatever disease is in vogue at the time (highest probability/least energy) or may produce a more exotic set of symptoms depending on the energy barriers erected by the immune system. Thus, drug effectiveness could be seen in terms of molecular obstacles placed in the path of the biochemical reactions associated with the disease process.

PK outside the body seems more difficult to us only because we haven't had all those years of practice that we have had with our bodies. Anyhow, why mess around trying to PK objects when it's much easier to use the body to move things. Also things outside of our bodies are in the public domain and are subject to a consensus about what constitutes "reality." The PK party provides an environment where the consensus can be changed temporarily allowing individuals to experience how sharply focused intention followed by a release can trigger a rather large energy transformation (as in metal bending).

Research into PK processes and energies should be one of the highest priority programs in the mind sciences. Rather than being another psychic novelty, it is my feeling that PK represents the most fundamental process in the universe.

Robert L. Shacklett, May 1985 ³

References:

1. http://www.whatthebleep.com/reality/

2. Conscious Acts of Creation:  The Emergence of A New Physics by William A. Tiller, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

3. http://www.epcomm.com/fmbr/editoral/specpk.htm