Reality Checking—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, October 2016
Mapping the Psychic Brain
by: Brent Raynes
A retired college professor I know who has claimed multiple alien encounters (once in 1988, shared with his then 23-year-old son) also described having had many paranormal experiences too (not uncommon among UFO contact experiencers). In describing his experiences with clairvoyance, he recalled a time when a fellow college professor who graduated with a Ph.D from Harvard came to him with an old camera, that had been a gift to him from one of his students. It was sealed in a case. “It had a three tier combo lock, 0 to 9, and no one knew the combination,” he recalled. (He) didn't want to open it by force and hoped that somehow I could help. I took a legal size yellow tablet. I have always used these, and drew three columns down on the tablet – 0, 9, 8, etc. Then, with (him) and (his wife) sitting silently there, I went into a kind of semi-trance, eyes closed, and let my somewhat numb arm bring the pen down three times. I got 033. Tried that and it didn't work. With a flash of intuition, I reversed the number to 330. That opened it – beautiful old camera in a fine case.”
“I learned later that such numbers in psychic contexts often come forth in reverse.”
In Lynne McTaggart's acclaimed book, The Field (2002), she writes this of the remote viewing work done at California's SRI (Stanford Research Institute) work that was headed by physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff: “Although the basic information came through, sometimes the details were a little blurred. Usually, the scene was flipflopped, so that the subject would see the reverse, as though looking at the scene through a mirror. Targ and Puthoff had wondered whether this might have to do with the ordinary activity of the visual cortex, as they understood it. The conventional view was that the cortex takes in a scene in reverse, and the brain corrects this by switching the scene. In this instance, the sight isn't being viewed by the eyes, but the brain still performs its reverse correction of the scene.”
A former engineering technician with NASA who later became a prominent psychic reader described to me how he had to learn to correct what he was psychically “seeing.” “In the early days of doing my medical intuitive work, I encountered this phenomenon a lot and it was perplexing to me when I kept seeing things in reverse like that,” he told me. “It was annoying to me to sometimes have to automatically reverse the image in my head to get the orientation right.”
Recently while thumbing through a copy of Impossible Possibilities by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1968, 1971, 1973), I found a brief but tantalizingly intriguing reference to a Soviet scientist whose parapsychological work went back to 1921. At one time, he was the director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leningrad University. He reportedly found that by placing a horseshoe magnet some two inches behind the back of the neck of a hypnotized subject, but only if its behind the right side, then allegedly optic images suggested to the subject become confused. The effect reportedly could only be achieved with the north pole of the magnet being used and would not work behind the left side. It was stated that the subject had no idea what was expected of him or what was going on, or even that a magnet was being used behind him.
In the book, this scientist was identified as a Professor Vassilyev. When I tried to google further information on him, I was unsuccessful. Then in a book entitled The New Soviet Psychic Discoveries, by Henry Gris and William Dick (1978), I found references to a Soviet Scientist who filled the bill, a Leningrad scientist identified as Dr. Leonid LeonidovichVasiliev. Then I was able to locate on the internet various sites that described some details of the late Dr. Vasiliev's work. Though none that seemed to shed further light on his magnetic experiments with hypnotized subjects as described in Impossible Possibilities.
I can't state with certainty that this information is going to prove that useful but as I've written in previous columns paranormal effects have been associated with hemispheric brain shifts, with parapsychologists noting how the right hemisphere seems to be the psychic side of our brain. In addition, Dr. Micheal Persinger, Todd Murphy, John Burke and other scientists, researchers and authors have also pondered and experimented on the role magnetic fields may play in affecting altered states of consciousness.
There are methods that we can use to get into the right side of our brain, so to speak. In Targ and Harary's book on remote viewing, The Mind Race (1984), they describe the effective strategy of the viewer, who is tapping into the right side of the brain associated with non-analytical processing, relating to spatial-pattern recognition, and another person who adopts the role of the interviewer who keeps the RV session on track by utilizing the left-brain's more verbal and analytical cognition. In Paul Devereux's book, Re-Visioning the Earth (1996), he shares how we should approach nature and sacred landscapes, and again it involves a hemispheric kind of shift in consciousness. He learned how vital it was to approach such ancient sites and landscapes and, as I was told once by a Native American medicine woman, while visiting such a site in Alabama, “Brent, get out of your head!” Devereux learned to do that, by shifting mental gears from his usual intellectual noise, his incessant posing of questions and theories, a state author Joseph Chilton Pearce once called “roof brain chatter,” and instead opening himself to a more passive, intuitive, what he even described as an “animistic mode of consciousness,” returning back to his modern condition of “mental noise” once his visit had been completed. He found that this way he discovered important things that he otherwise would not have.
In a book entitled Whole-Brain Thinking (1984) by Jacquelyn Wonder and Priscilla Donovan, the authors explain how breathing through either the left nasal passage or the right nasal passage affects a shift in ones brain activity and ones cerebral dominance. Though previously known by ancient yoga practitioners, this was confirmed in modorn EEG studies conducted at San Diego's Davis Center for Behavioral Neurobiology. In addition, in his book Beyond Telepathy (1962, 1973), Dr. Andrija Puharich describes his laboratory testing of psychics and how the highest scores were found to be associated with breathing through the left nostril. As with handedness, the left nostril relates to the right hemisphere of the brain. Puharich had checked mouth-breathing [with nostils sealed] and breathing through just the left or right nostil. He also noted that psychic “mediums” usually develop what he stated was left-sided upper respiratory pathology. Some even believe that with the art of psychometry, wherein a person picks up impressions of a person by holding an object from that person, that if you're right handed then you should hold the object in your left hand, and vice versa, again based on the hemispheric shift concept. You can find this technique described in Harold Sherman's book You Can Communicate with the Unseen World (1974).
Many paranormal researchers feel that the psychic switchboard, so to speak, is connected to the right brain hemisphere and some feel that TLE (Temporal Lobe Epilepsy) may trigger such events. However, as in the following case, it just may sometimes extinguish such occurrences. I'd say that in this case, TLE developed in the left hemisphere disrupting right brain communications. Back in March 2015, an American experiencer who for years now has been living in London, England, who I had last been in touch with about 10 years earlier, noted how for some 14 years at that point she had suffered “an inner ear infection” that “triggered left temporal lobe epilepsy.” She added that it was a “very rare” condition, that it was “undiagnosed for all that time.”
“It's now nearly under control through medication,” she stated. She had had some “mental seizures” with this. “It may be the temporal lobe anomaly that caused a lot of things, but I've had shared experiences and one that gave me info I couldn't have otherwise known,” she explained. “My neurologist doesn't think it has anything to do with the odd things in my life. Nor that it was triggered by my ear infection. She now says only meningitis would trigger it. There's no reason for it. No trauma, no lesion, and no history.”
In addition, she has a father and a son who are also experiencers. She has a Masters in Education and is a certified medical hypnotherpist. But to say that her paranormal and UFO/alien experiences were simply odd is an understatement, but even the majority of ufologists seem largely unaware as to how strange the UFO contact syndrome can be. “It began back in Michigan with just one small humanoid being,” she wrote me back in 2005. “He'd crack me up! I saw him twice. The first was when I was being all solemn about having my very own office, in a professional building. He came sashaying in with a huge sombrero on! Then, the last time I 'saw' him air skiing behind our car all the way to Florida. Here, in England, I 'saw' a group of men in lab coats that got excited when I waved at them and I then later 'saw' an insectoid watching me.” She wondered if back in childhood she may have had an “alien attachment,” as she stated that she had seen a “clear body step out of my own.” Also back in 2005, she complained of having been “infected with a toxic mold” after moving to London, and how not “a single weird thing” had happened for several years.
Perhaps the source of the ear infection? She did mention then it was in her “eustachian tubes” [recall that in previous columns I've written of “voices” that communicated psychic information via the left ear] and she had even mentioned a “nasal implant” that she suspected had been “damaged by the fungus.” And, speaking of implant, she even added, “I felt an implant in my arm-twice. The first time I felt it, it moved further inside me, with its own volition. That freaked me out. It's a really weird feeling to have something in your body, hiding from you. I felt it again after I got ill. It was lifeless and didn't react to my pressing on it. I think it was 'dead.'”
“My last experience was awakening in bed to a dullish flash of light, the sound of sand falling, which got me to open my eyes, and a double ring of green light above the bed. A few weeks later, I was very ill. ...I haven't even seen a UFO since the green light rings! I've only seen one UFO here in London. I did meet some ghosts here before I got ill, though. A group of boys who'd died in a fire in our building when it was an industrial school woke me. I showed them how to go play in the Light and they all, but one, quickly left. That one was a small dark creeping blob who felt guilty, I think. I told him to go play, too, and it left.”
Alien experiencers also statistically seem more prone to seeing “ghosts,” and other paranormal entities. Authur John Keel wrote me way back when I was a teenaged UFO buff that if I wanted to better understand the complex contactee syndrome, then I needed to familiarize myself with literature on apparitions and spiritual phenomena. He had expressed that ufology should more properly be a branch of parapsychology. Some experiencers suspect that their alien encounters have increased their “vibrational” awareness and abilities to “see” other higher energy forms, thus becoming enabled to see into the “spirit world” or other “dimensions.”
Or is the explanation something more prosaic?
