The Science of Deep Trance Meditation (cont'd.)

i. Mindreach

The simplest - but clearly incomplete - explanation for what Douglas does is to classify it merely as an exponent of the MINDREACH phenomenon, named after the book of the selfsame name by Doctors Targ and Puthoff. This seminal work, published in 1977 by Delacorte Press, established via respected, double-blind testing protocols, that it is possible to "send" the mind of one person to a given geographical location, and have that person report on what he or she "sees" there. In its own way, it is probably the strongest single argument for ESP advanced within the last century. Ironically, it received little press coverage when first published, and even less interest from the public at large.

[Note: the experiments in the original MINDREACH series used map co-ordinates almost exclusively to provide a "scent" for their psychics. Later iterations of these protocols, however, were much looser - using names, dates, historical events, etc. Douglas - as did Cayce - relies almost exclusively on the individual's name, but with a street address to "boost" the signal, or amplify the name, if you like. Why a name? Because in the annals of esoteric literature dating back to the beginning of history, one's name is the most intimate connection an intuitive can latch onto. This is why, for example, the so-called elite "psychic societies," so prominent in 19th Century Europe, required new members to immediately assume a pseudonym, or initials, and never use their given names. This was to protect them from enemies known and unknown. The children's fairy tale, "Rumpelstiltskin" tells the same story in a different, but equally compelling way - that discovering someone's true name is the ultimate way to control that person.]

In fact, it would be almost a decade later before the implications of what Drs. Tang and Puthoff had achieved reached the mass (media) mind. In 1989, the top-rated US drama TV series "Columbo" devoted an entire episode to a murderer who "fooled" the US government into hiring him by falsely replicating the MINDREACH phenomenon.

So, as to the question of whether life imitates art, or vice versa, the answer may possibly be found in the mid-1990s, when no less than Time magazine did a surprise cover story "exposing" the US government's top-secret 10-year-old resarch program into deploying the MINDREACH protocol for miltary purposes. [The headline read "The Vision Thing - Ten Years And $20 Million Later, The Pentagon Discovers That Psychics Are Unreliable Spies."] Students of conspiracy theory were delighted to note that, simultaneous to the Time "expose," was the news that the US government had determined there was, seemingly, no real value in the protocol, and was promptly disbanding its programs.

Coincidence? Disinformation? True or not, it was clear, nonetheless, that the US was in fact disbanding something, as, over the following years, a plethora of hereto unknown writers began to come forward, each claiming they had been within the "inner circle" of the US Government's Remote Viewing Project (one of its many names) and, via their books, proceeded to share their top-secret experiences with millions of readers (such as the popular Psychic Warrior, and its sequel, both written by ex-remote viewer and self-proclaimed spy, David Morehouse).

Of course, to simply label Douglas's talent an extension of MINDREACH ultimately begs the question. It tells us how he gets to where he is going, but not how he finds the information with which to answer questions about what he has found. For that, we can perhaps benefit from several hints that Edgar Cayce himself left in his own trance sessions. Many times, replying to the suggestion that he was "channeling" (something that Douglas has been accused of as well), Cayce would reply with the information that, in fact, it was his own "superconscious" that questioners were in contact with.

The ARE itself, the research organization founded by the Cayce family after Edgar's death in 1945, says of their founder: "His own higher self - or his superconscious mind - was the source of the information. So it was not a nonphysical being speaking through Edgar Cayce, but his own superconscious mind that generally obtained the information from the individual getting the reading, or from what he called the Akhashic Records. These records can be briefly described as a history of every soul since the dawn of creation." Unfortunately, other than the above-quoted synopsis, the ARE has not expounded further on what precisely this ability might be, or why the hypnotic trance is the "key" to unlocking it. To solve that riddle, we must dig a bit deeper.

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