Psychic research

Psychic research is concerned with extra-sensorimotor phenomena in general. This covers the following areas: Extrasensory perception (ESP, also called bioinformation) including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and retrocognition; Psychokinesis (also called bioenergetics) including teleportation, materialization, psychic healing, psychic photography, and out-of-body experience; and Survival phenomena including apparitions, hauntings, mediumship, and poltergeists (where not treated as psychokinesis).

Parapsychology is not synonymous with psychic research, confining itself primarily to the laboratory study of psi phenomena – a collective term which includes extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. Paraphysics, defined as the study of those paranormal phenomena which can be viewed as extensions and generalizations of physical phenomena, is especially concerned with relationships between psychic research and physics, including such phenomena as dowsing, radiesthesia, physical mediumship and the physical aspects of parapsychological research and of paranormal healing.

The status of parapsychology remains controversial. Spontaneous phenomena continue to be reported frequently, but there has been little success in applying experimental control or in arriving at any real theoretical understanding of the matter. Such phenomena may be explicable within the framework of modern physics. Research continues to be carried out in the hope of conclusive data and some predict that in the relatively near future it may be possible to train people to develop and control psychic abilities and to control physiological processes. Another area of interest is the part which parapsychology could play in the the possible reintegration of science and religion.

The potential importance of this field of study for human development lies in the possibility that understanding such phenomena may require a revision of the concept of individuals as psychically isolated. For if the conventional concept of human beings as separate egos is correct, there cannot be any actual expansion of the self. But if the self in some real sense encompasses its social and physical environment and extends beyond the borders of is organism, then science, technology and social policy cannot be expected to respond to its needs until the possibility of an extrasomatic self is recognized.