Ghosts - By Hans Holzer Page 0,20

wider use of your own ESP powers—which we will discuss later.

The ESP experience can take the form of a hunch, an uncanny feeling, or an intuitive impression. Or it can be stronger and more definite, such as a flash, an image or auditory signal, a warning voice, or a vision, depending on who you are and your inborn talents as a receiver.

The first impulse with all but the trained and knowledgeable is to suppress the “message” or to explain it away, sometimes taking grotesque paths in order to avoid admitting the possibility of having had an extrasensory experience. Frequently, such negative attitudes toward what is a natural part of human personality can lead to tragedy, or, at the very least, to annoyance; for the ESP impulse is never in vain. It may be a warning of disaster or only an advance notice to look out for good opportunities ahead, but it always has significance, even though you may miss the meaning or choose to ignore the content. I call this substance of the ESP message cognizance, since it represents instant knowledge without logical factors or components indicating time and effort spent in obtaining it.

The strange thing about ESP is that it is really far more than an extra, sixth sense, equal in status to the other five. It is actually a supersense that operates through the other five to get its messages across.

Thus a sixth-sense experience many come through the sense of sight as a vision, a flash, or an impression; the sense of hearing as a voice or a sound effect duplicating an event to be; the sense of smell as strange scents indicating climates other than the present one or smells associated with certain people or places; the sense of touch—a hand on the shoulder, the furtive kiss, or fingering by unseen hands; and the sense of taste—stimulation of the palate not caused by actual food or drink.

Of these, the senses of smell and taste are rarely used for ESP communication, while by far the majority of cases involve either sight or sound or both. This must be so because these two senses have the prime function of informing the conscious mind of the world around us.

What has struck me, after investigating extrasensory phenomena for some twenty-odd years, is the thought that we are not really dealing with an additional dimension as such, an additional sense like touch or smell, but a sense that is nonphysical—the psychic, which, in order to make itself known, must manifest itself through the physical senses. Rather than an extra sense, we really have here an extension of the normal five senses into an area where logical thinking is absent and other laws govern. We can compare it to the part of the spectrum that is invisible to the naked eye. We make full use of infrared and ultraviolet and nobody doubts the existence of these “colors,” which are merely extensions of ordinary red and violet.

Thus it is with extrasensory perception, and yet we are at once at war with the physical sciences, which want us to accept only that which is readily accessible to the five senses, preferably in laboratories. Until radio waves were discovered, such an idea was held to be fantastic under modern science, and yet today we use radio to contact distant heavenly bodies.

It all adds up to this: Our normal human perception, even with instruments extending it a little, is far from complete. To assert that there is no more around us than the little we can measure is preposterous. It is also dangerous, for in teaching this doctrine to our children, we prevent them from allowing their potential psychic abilities to develop unhampered. In a field where thought is a force to be reckoned with, false thinking can be destructive.

Sometimes a well-meaning but otherwise unfamiliar reporter will ask me, “How does science feel about ESP?” That is a little like asking how mathematics teachers feel about Albert Einstein. ESP is part of science. Some scientists in other fields may have doubts about its validity or its potentials, just as scientists in one area frequently doubt scientists in other areas. For example, some chemists doubt what some medical science say about the efficiency of certain drugs, or some underwater explorers differ with the opinions expressed by space explorers, and the beliefs of some medical doctors differ greatly from what other medical doctors believe. A definition of science is in order. Contrary to what some people think, science is