About ten years ago, when I was doing a lot of research on paranormal abilities, I interviewed some test subjects who had shown, in lab studies, a capacity that far exceeded expected averages.

These were people who could influence the distribution of little balls that dropped through a funnel into a case outfitted with pegged compartments where the balls would stop.

These people could receive and interpret messages sent to them from a few miles away.

They could tell what cards were going to be turned up from a deck. And so on.

In the interviews, I found various people used various methods to score at high levels in the experiments.

“First I prayed.”

“First I meditated to clear my mind.”

“I imagined I was a genius.”

“I imagined I was getting the answers from a secretary sitting at a desk in Omaha. I figured a person like that would never lie to me.”

“I visualized a fast-moving car. I was in it. The answers were coming down like rays of sun through the roof.”

“I visualized a tiger blocking out wrong answers.”

“I imagined a wall of water that pushed the balls to one side of the case as they dropped through.”

“My sister, who had died a few years before, told me the answers.”

“I made my mind completely blank, like a sieve.”

“I asked an angel for help.”

“I pretended that I sold my soul to the devil, and he gave me the skill to do well in the experiment. Then, afterwards, I bought back my soul for a dollar.”

“I imagined I had been put in an insane asylum because I had stopped traffic with my mind at a busy intersection. From my room at the asylum, I answered the questions in the experiment.”

One man told me that the night before he was due to participate in a lab experiment, he drew diagrams that hooked up all sorts of planets, like “reflectors.” These planets could trap the messages sent to him from a sealed room three miles away from the lab. The planets would reflect a message among themselves in a specific sequence, and finally deliver the information to him.

A woman told me that, during an experiment, she imagined she was having sex with a famous opera singer, who would whisper the right answers in her ear.

After these interviews, I no longer had any doubt that imagination was linked to paranormal abilities.

Among the many statements made by the filmmaker Francis Coppola about his own work, there are several interesting remarks that suggest he “imagined” he had talent, since he couldn’t find a great deal of what he thought of as “natural talent” within himself. Having imagined he was able to make films, he proceeded to make them.

I once knew a successful stockbroker who went to sleep at night prepared to dream about the market. He did dream, and he obtained good stock tips in those dreams.

I have known many athletes who visualized how they would perform in an upcoming game before they went out on the field. Some of these men imagined they had already had a successful game -- “seeing the final result as if it had already happened” -- and some of them imagined their specific actions unfolding as a process of steps.

For the athletes, no one method of visualization was the most workable one.

I have known musicians who imagined, before going out on the stage, the feeling of playing before the audience, or who imagined the music coming out of their mouths in a stream, or who imagined a mental clarity that would allow them to blend with the other musicians, or who imagined a pile of money waiting for them at the end of the concert.

I spoke with a singer who, before every concert, ate a seafood salad, and imagined that every piece of food was a gift of strength from various Greek gods.

I spoke with a writer of books about visualization. He confided that no one system was any better than any other. Each person would find his own best strategies. But for the purpose of writing and selling the books, he said he needed to present a favored system.

A psychologist told me that he indoctrinated his patients to believe (imagine) that his method of nullifying past problems really worked. “They get rid of their pasts by believing that they can,” he said.

I remarked that his method sounded a little cultish. He confessed that it was, but said it was too hard to teach people to rely on their own ability to imagine and create.

I can safely say that, during this period of research on the paranormal, I met no one who used a method that any rational materialist would call obvious and useful. In other words, every successful test subject I spoke with was doing, by conventional standards, crazy and quirky stuff.

And was succeeding.

Which only proves that the imagination itself is unconventional and not part of the recognized mainstream.

I saw that children can have tremendous success, after some practice, in paranormal experiments. Unfortunately, children are sometimes used by groups -- the kids are loaded down with all sorts of quasi-spiritual myths and baggage, and this amounts to a kind of mind control.

The most widely tested categories of paranormal abilities -- ESP, psycho-kinetics, seeing the future -- provide evidence that what we take to be the fundamental and permanent aspects of reality are quite arbitrary and malleable.

Or to put it another way, reality is a con.

I recommend Dean Radin’s excellent book, The Conscious Universe. Radin demonstrates clearly that, over a range of hundreds and hundreds of well-controlled, well-designed paranormal lab studies, these extraordinary abilities are PROVEN. Statistically.

I once mentioned this to a filmmaker who had labored for years to record these abilities in action. She said, “Then what the hell am I doing? You mean I’m documenting what’s already been demonstrated?”

Whether scientists define physical reality as a complex machine or a highly sophisticated set of self-generating probabilities, they assume that reality is a monolith, built to follow patterns that cannot be changed except through intervention by other man-made machines or forces (e.g., a bomb). How wrong they are.

Reality is a myth that depends for its permanence on the assumption that humans cannot create, with their imaginations alone, other realities.

What we call paranormal is not on the radar screen of the major media. When presented in that forum, it is characterized as weird, dubious, phony, crazy, hallucinatory, or at best, unexplainable. “And now let’s move on to sports.”

But the huge public thirst for connecting with this area is reflected in box office receipts garnered by hundreds and hundreds of Hollywood films that present, in one form or another. paranormal events.

To keep the natives of planet Earth in a compliant state, organized religion has taken over this subject and twisted it into many myths and sub-myths, all of which are designed to disguise the truth.

In a similar vein, that cockeyed and untenable theory called evolution has attempted to define humans as extensions of one-celled organisms whose central ambition is survival through physical adaptation.

Looking through the wrong end of the telescope can conceal a great deal.

We feverishly try to exclude and deny what we can really do, and we will accept any hypothesis that keeps us down on the farm.

By ACCEPT, I mean IMAGINE.

You can imagine you are less, or you can imagine you are more.

If we imagine we are more, we can then occupy a platform from which we can imagine and bring into being realities without limit.

What we generally call civilization is devoted to keeping that from happening.

We pretend (imagine) our imaginations are powerless. And if we stop pretending that, we then tend to pretend (imagine) that we don’t know how to use, or what to do with, our imaginations. For instruction, we gravitate toward the very kind of closed system we formerly used to bury our own imaginations.

And we say all this has nothing to do with internally imposed mind control. Of course not. We are not mind controlled. We are operating at full capacity. Of course we are. Sure. You bet.

Since I began writing articles on imagination and creation a few years ago, I’ve had a number of people ask me how they can “escape the prison.”

I don’t want to get cute about this. My archive contains various solutions to various problems scattered through the hundreds of pieces I’ve written on this site.

And on PREMIUM CONTENT, I explore these matters as well.

My publisher, The Truth Seeker, sells my many taped courses on imagination, which contain all sorts of interesting exercises one can do. (760-489-5211)

And my book, The Secret Behind Secret Societies, goes into this area.

At the same time, it would be foolish to suggest that your imagination is merely a fallow object which has no power of its own. Since quite the opposite is the case.

As I’ve written many times, the degree to which we are all MIND-CONTROL SUBJECTS, AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, is reflected in our own bewilderment about what to invent, how to invent, and so on.

THIS IS A KEY FACT.