ESP Mind Research

Robert Masters and Jean Houston, the directors of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, New York, are known for their research into psychedelic drugs, hypnosis, sexual behavior, and humanistic psychology. Masters (1974) describes a very intensive "psychenaut" training program involving hundreds of hours of hypnotic trance work. The theoretical premise behind this work is that extraordinary mental capacities are inhibited or obstructed by "a narrow range of states of consciousness within which most of our experience is fixed by accident, beliefs, and various other cultural conditionings." In addition to ESP and PK, the psychenaut training program emphasizes the development of creative processes, quantities and qualities of memory, increased rates of thought, increased concentration and enhanced sensory perception.

Masters (1974) describes the development of ESP abilities in a single subject who indicated no psi abilities in an unspecified pretest. The initial stages of the training simply involved attaining maximum trance depth and also self-induction of the trance state. Further training involved the experience of vivid visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory mental imagery, accelerated mental processing through time distortion, access to literary and musical creative processes, experience of the energy systems in the body as described by yoga ("powerful sensations of energy moving up the spine and reaching the brain, where explosions of colorful and white lights occur"), prolonged trances lasting up to several days, programming of the belief system to accept the validity of untapped human potentials, personal problem solving, experience of symbolic inner dramas, induction of states of consciousness most conducive to specific tasks, and continuous exercise of favored individual capacities.

Throughout the training, Masters states that testing was done to measure improved psi performance and to devise further means to improve performance. According to Masters, the person developed telepathic ability simultaneously with the activation of the yogic energy system in her body when the duration of her trance was at an average of four hours. A portion of each experimental session was allotted for the development of her ESP abilities. Emphasis was placed on the creation of "physical sensations serving to differentiate authentic telepathic transmission from her own guesses and fantasies." Several informal experiments are described in which the subject individual displayed remarkable ESP ability involving visual imagery as well as the accurate perception of intense emotional targets. Masters notes that her performance fell off with standard ESP testing, which seemed to bore her. He also notes that this ability would only exhibit itself in the trance state and not in waking consciousness. He states that this individual case is typical of about half a dozen other cases and speculates that increased abilities can be trained through the development of trances sustained for "several weeks or even longer."

Masters (1974) describes this approach to psi research this way: "It is my belief that the researcher investigating extraordinary phenomena must be willing to pass into the traditional domains of religion, mysticism and the mysteries, art, mythology, magic and the occult. These areas, if explored without credulousness, dogmatism, and undue anxiety, may be more fruitful pathways to follow than ‘science,' on the road to understanding the phenomena being studied. After all, who is likely to be the more effective clairvoyant or telepath - the scientist or the shaman? ... For my own part, I am not committed to the tantric, Sufi, or Jungian positions, any more than I am to the Freudian and behaviorist (‘just fantasy') interpretations of visionary experience.... I have defined myself with regard to the material of my experiments as an explorer and phenomenologist. As phenomenologist, I do not have to, and must not, deal with questions such as that of ontological status. In this role, one does not evaluate - he only describes."

Another interesting case is reported by Masters (1974) in which a woman seems to have entered into the archetypal realm in which the ancient Egyptian goddess, Sekhmet, resides as an intelligent being. In trance, she expressed to the goddess a desire to be allowed to undergo training as a priestess. Masters states, "She was told that this would be allowed but that the work would be long and exacting and would require her total commitment." Since that time the woman has received training instructions, while in trance, which filled five volumes at the time the 1974 paper was written. Masters states that the material is quite consistent with what is known of Egyptian magic and spiritual disciplines, although "existing scholarship does not allow us to say whether it is an authentic system in the historical sense." Masters states that these sessions have had a psychotherapeutic value for the woman, which included the healing of physical injuries. Emphasis in the teachings of "Sekhmet" is placed on the ability to externalize mental images through concentration, projecting images onto a surface or creating images in empty space. Much of the teaching also has dealt with experiencing energy systems inside of the body. "Experiences in the body have included powerful energy surges up the spine, to the brain, with sensations of a boring out and opening of the ‘third eye' area." There has also been training in "thinking and communicating with energies" which is described as a "higher level process than verbal or image thought." The woman describes this teaching as follows: "After a while there was a new kind of image that presented itself as energy. It would shoot from Sekhmet's eyes or thumbs, hang in the air, or crawl in my skin. There seemed to be three kinds of this energy: a misty, cloudy smoky substance composed of minute particles; electric, luminous light lines of energy; and a fluorescent pool of oscillating energy. I had experienced them all not just visually but with my mind and body. Sekhmet told me that they all had meaning and this was the way I should learn to communicate, for it is more effective, economical, and powerful. I found them fantastically beautiful and enjoyed the experience of them on every level, but I didn't see how I was ever to understand them."

Masters states that he has given very few suggestions to this woman while in trance, and that much of the material is beyond either his or her experience. The trances typically last from two to three and a half hours, although she experiences this time period as being several days in length.

Masters states that the woman has received teachings concerning levitation, telepathy, clairvoyance, PK, OBEs, and teleportation. However, at the time of this article, she still required considerable preliminary training and these phenomena had not yet been observed. In an interview with this author in August 1978, Masters stated that the woman eventually diverted her interest from the Sekhmet training to the study of martial arts and has subsequently become "the highest ranking woman in the martial arts in Canada." Regarding her psi performance, Masters gave the following evaluation: "We got a great deal of random psi phenomena with her, but not things that were readily verifiable. She got very telepathic and very often precognitive, but it didn't lend itself to experimental work. There were countless instances of it. When you're doing anything as intense as I was doing with her, you always get a lot of psi effects. But it usually isn't the case that they can sit down and tell you what card is coming up next."

Masters offered his opinion that the best way to train psychic abilities in any one is to combine the long trances with a great deal of "psychophysical exercises." These exercises are based on the Feldenkreis and Alexander techniques, as well as yoga, and are described in a new book by Masters and Houston titled Listening to the Body (1978). Masters added that the longest trance which has been attained so far has lasted about a week.

Another basic text of the psychenaut program is Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space, written by Masters and Houston and published in 1972. This book contains instructions for group experiences in exploring through trance and other mental disciplines a wide variety of mental experiences which are not generally cultivated in the normal consciousness of our culture. These exercises, however, stop short of those specifically oriented toward the production of measurable psi phenomena, and are more oriented towards the development of intuitions and insights in which psi-mediated information, in everyday life, is combined with other cognitive processes.

Masters, R.L. Consciousness and extraordinary phenomena. In J. White (Ed.), Psychic exploration: A challenge for science. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974.

Masters, R.L., and Houston, J. Listening to the body. New York: Delacorte, 1978.

Masters, R.L., and Houston, J. Mind games: The guide to inner space. New York: Delta, 1972.

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