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Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green

….. the extrasensory experience of this third student, a senior at Washburn University, is not easy to explain by a subliminal sensory process. It also happened near the end of the research. On a day when he came to discuss his week's practice sessions at Washburn, he reported the following events.

During a theta session, just before noon in the early part of the week, he had an image of going home for lunch and hearing his roommate say,

"You got a letter from Pittsburg (Kansas) and one from Wichita. You've been accepted for grad school at Wichita!" It was so real that he thought, "What's he doing opening my mail!", which brought him so completely out of the quiet state that he decided to end his session and go home for lunch.

When he opened the door to his apartment, his roommate greeted him, letters in hand, saying, "Hey! You got a letter from Pittsburg and one from Wichita. You've been accepted for grad school at Wichita."

"Did you open my mail?" he asked.

"No," his roommate replied, "I just bent the envelope like this and peeked through the window and saw where it said you had been accepted."

The subject went on to tell of other strange things that had happened during the week. Several times he had known who was calling him before he picked up the phone, when calls were not expected, and in one case when it was someone who had never called him before. He ended with" I don't like this. I don't believe in any of this stuff." This student was a bright, practical person with a good sense of humor, but he was a psychology major in a behaviorist-oriented (Skinnerian) psychology department. He had no frame of reference into which he could fit what had happened. We talked for a while, and he accepted my suggestion to do some reading that might make the things that he had experienced seen more reasonable.

This student reported one further ESP experience that was precognitive. It was a few days after the conclusion of the training sessions. He came for a last conference, and I sensed that he was disturbed when he came in. He paced back and forth across the room, then told me that three nights before, just as he was falling asleep, he had had a sudden sharp image of Governor George Wallace being shot.

It startled him, but he had shrugged it off as a bad dream, and in the hurry of the many pregraduation things to do during the next days, it had slipped his mind. While driving to the research building for his meeting with me, he had turned on his car radio and heard the announcement that Governor Wallace had been shot. He didn't want to know such things in advance, he declared. What was his responsibility? he asked.

I answered that this is a problem to be considered. However, knowing the general non-acceptance of psychic phenomena, it was my feeling that he had no responsibility to tell anyone what he had "seen." Had he tried to do anything in that case, probably he would have been regarded as strange, sick, or maybe even dangerous.

We talked about such phenomena simply happening in one's life. If they happen, it may be useful to learn what one can from them rather than to deny them. But it is not necessary to seek them. Being psychic is often a nuisance, a distraction, and that is probably one reason why teachers down through the ages have recommended that one not strive for such powers. As one teacher put it:

Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven which is within you and all else shall be added unto you.

 I spoke with this student by telephone about six months later. He was doing well in graduate school and was still using the relaxation and quieting exercises to advantage. He reported no further ESP experiences, but he no longer says "I don't believe in that stuff."