The Encyclopedia of Crystals, Herbs, and New Age Elements: An A to Z Guide to New Age Elements and How to Use Them - Adams Media 2016

ESP
The Power of Insight: Divination Systems, Tools, and Practices

ORIGINS

ESP, which stands for extrasensory perception, is the ability to receive information using the mind rather than the five physical senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). It is also known as the sixth sense. There are many types of ESP, including clairvoyance (paranormal seeing), clairaudience (paranormal hearing), and clairsentience (paranormal sensing or feeling). For example, a clairvoyant individual has the ability to “see” events or people that do not exist in the present time, a clairaudient person is able to “hear” past or future events or voices, and a clairsentient person can “feel” the emotions of others.

HISTORY/LORE

Beginning in the late 1920s, while employed at the newly founded Duke University, the American botanist J.B. Rhine (1895—1980) and his wife, Louisa, performed research in a field they called “parapsychology,” which covers such abilities as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. Parapsychology built on the existing field of “psychical” research, whose main goal was to find evidence of an afterlife. In one of the Rhines’s ESP experiments, a “sender” would look at a set of ESP cards bearing a series of symbols, and the “receiver” would say which symbol was on each card. The Rhines’s work led to the development of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935 and the official recognition of parapsychology as a field of experimental science.

USES

Despite the controversial nature of the topic (and flat-out rejection by a significant swath of the scientific community), the field of parapsychology still exists today, although in a much different form than it did when the Rhines created it. Their experiments with cards have been replaced by more modern techniques that measure the physiological characteristics of psychics and healers, among other methods. Some say that we all have psychic abilities that we simply need to uncover and hone, while others believe that only a select few are born with these abilities. Whatever your stance on the issue, there is a seemingly endless array of books, films, websites, and other media that deal with the topic of ESP, allowing anyone to make a hobby out of studying (and even practicing) this fascinating phenomenon.