Chapter 3

The panorama of the twentieth-century story of the superpowers of the human bio-mind would be greatly enhanced by autobiographies of the early Soviet researchers, especially of Kazhinski and Vasliev.
I've not been able to discover if any were written. But it may be that something along those lines does exist, made invisible by the former KGB secrecy, or lost in the political turbulence when the Soviet Empire fell in 1989. Something along these lines may even exist inside the American intelligence community which always compiled information about important Soviet personalities.

One wonders, for example, if Kazhinski's 1919 event was the only one he experienced, or if he had been, as is sometimes said in the West, a "psychic child."
Indeed, one wonders in this regard about what WERE the personal experiential levels of all the early Soviet researchers of bio-communications and distant influencing.
One also can wonder about why this particular and very strange topic took on such early importance within the very serious upsets of the early years of the Russian Revolution.

There is a great, but quite hidden story here, one never brought to the attention of American readers.
But perhaps the answers exist within the Soviet research documents known to have been sold in their entirety to Japan after the Soviet fall in 1989 when the black-market transfer of such information was seen as an economic opportunity.
The crafty Russians then sold, it is rumored by insiders, a duplicate set of the documents and evidence to China.
I've also been told, on somewhat good authority, the Russians also sold another complete set to a volatile nation in the Middle East -- from which the documents were shared with yet another volatile nation nearby.

So the story of bio-communications and distant influencing is by no means ended, and the inquiry into the existence of our species superpowers is here to stay, even if cloaked in secrecy here and there.

Although the phrase "the psychic child" didn't yet exist in the early years of my life, I did experience many types of so-called psychic phenomena.
But since it is one of the deliberate, but important goals of this book to demobilize the stereotyped, misinformative use of that decidedly ambiguous term "psychic," I will here begin replacing it with the concept of "exceptional human experience."

This is a concept originated either in whole or in part by the stalwart Rhea A. White, who set herself to the monumental task of gathering first-hand evidence of and cataloguing the superpowers of the human bio-mind under the general heading of exceptional human experiencing.
As a result, one can begin to see, among other types of data in her documents, the beginning outlines of the spectrum of the superpowers -- a spectrum which should have been established and embellished upon decades ago but never was.
Anyone seriously interested in the superpowers might avail themselves of Rhea's documents. [Exceptional Human Experience Network, Inc., 414 Rockledge Road, New Bern, NC 18561. Fax (919) 636-8371. E-Mail: 76460.633@compuserve.com].

To the so-called "psychic child," and who probably knows nothing at all of things "psychic," the exceptional experiencing undergone has to do with spontaneous shifts in perception and awareness. It is quite likely that all of the superpowers are matters involving different states of perception and awareness.
It is rather well known that the perceptions and awarenesses of very young children are "open," although no one really knows very much about what that consists of.
If the child can articulate the experiencing, then he or she begins talking about it, asking questions which few can answer.
When it is seen by others that the child is reporting strange and weird stuff, then it is "encouraged" to suppress the experiencing, or at least stop reporting on it. Most young children would rather not be called a "weirdo," right?
Eventually, usually by the age of seven if not before, the "open" perceptions and awarenesses become narrowed down or collapsed into whatever is thought of as "normal" in their socio-environment.
The child's perceptions are now no longer open, but closed and reformatted to more or less agree with what is sometimes called "adapting the child to normalcy."

This, of course, also means dis-adapting the child to his or her inherent access to various states of perceptions and awareness -- and which then means that the child grows up with closed perceptions and awarenesses -- simply because of social disciplines in this regard.

In any event, I was such a child and underwent all of the above, but with one exception. I did not forget the exceptional experiencing as most children do in order not to be bothered with such.
Such forgetting is useful in the pursuit of being seen as normal, since the person doesn't want to feel weird within self.

Beyond this memory aspect, and up until 1971, the basic contours of my life were not all that irregular. On the mundane surface of those contours, there was really nothing to suggest my person or activities would become a glitch in any issues much beyond my personal ambiance and "realities."
Thus, the basic outlines are as follow.
I was born and received a quite good formal education -- not because any special efforts were taken to provide it, but because during my youth education was still being competently delivered.
I graduated with a BA degree in 1955, having carried a double major in biology and art. I did well in both subjects because they deeply interested me.
Had my life been completely my own in 1955, I would have gone on to obtain a MA degree in bacteriology, and ultimately to attempt a Ph.D. in genetics and genetic research.
Art was my other vivid passion, but I planned to pursue it only as an avocation.
But because of my memory of exceptional experiencing, I was deeply interested in all such matters -- but only intellectually so.

However, in 1955, the life of young males in these United States was not theirs alone. The circumstances of military preparedness prevailed and intervened. All males were required to spend two years in military service and their lives could not proceed until that service had been rendered.
Because of this, I enlisted in the US Army, spending most of the tour of duty in Korea and the Far East. After basic training, I volunteered for Korean duty, much hated by most other soldiers, because I wanted to go to Asia and this was my first chance to do so.
It was in Korea, which I loved and adored, that I took the decision to go to New York and become a painter.

Thus, I duly arrived in New York in 1958 -- there to join with the 25,000 other struggling artists who also had come from far and wide to dwell (and hopefully "make it") in the world's leading Art Establishment.
To support myself until I had "made it," it was necessary to earn a living, and I elected to try for a job in the Secretariat of the United Nations.
This was duly achieved, and I worked at the dignified world organization at rather menial jobs until 1968 when I decided permanently to exit "wage slavery" and become "self-employed" as a painter and a writer.

With that achieved, my life then took a serious downturn regarding economic factors, and three times I was seriously tempted to resume my permanent contract at the UN, since the invitation to do so at any time was open to me.
But I managed to eke out something of a living -- because, back then, my personal overhead needs were not very large. I mostly supported myself selling a few paintings -- and by writing, under assumed names, a number of "sex books" which were all the rage back then since the Sex Revolution had gotten underway.

It was because of what I saw as my life's commitment to art and painting that I was consistently stereotyped as a "psychic New York artist" which publicity began coming my way.
This stereotyping might dignify my humble self in the eyes of some few. But mostly it could easily be interpreted as being uninformed and inarticulate regarding all other matters, and otherwise quite wacko, since both psychics and artists are seen that way in mainstream contexts.

My intellectual interest in psychic matters, however, was very deep. But I never imagined participating in anything parapsychological, and in fact recoiled from any such things for reasons which will become clear in the chapters ahead.

Then, in 1971, a series of exceedingly unusual circumstances and events SUDDENLY commenced, seemingly out of nowhere. And because of those, and to my great and everlasting surprise, I was sucked into situations I could not have anticipated or envisioned even in my most exotic imagination.
And it is those circumstances which are the backbone of this book.

As to autobiographical elements which are integral to the story of remote viewing, I shall take the lead from a particular question often asked of me by sophisticated people thoroughly acquainted with the REAL ways and byways of the human world.
That question has to do with how I came to SURVIVE for so long through the exceedingly difficult circumstances which arose after 1971, and how, at the same time, I managed to go so much against "prevailing wisdom" and introduce the new concepts I did -- albeit much with the help of others much stronger and more powerful than myself.

To make this question intelligible, we must digress a bit here so I can have a stab at pointing up that the nature of those real ways and byways elude the cognizance of compulsive optimists, bliss bunnies, spirituality-ists and others who are likewise illiterate, naive or stupid regarding them.
For the most part, those real ways and byways are hard, demanding, cruel, unforgiving, even unmerciful and completely and entirely competitive -- and, it should as well be said, often deadly.
The softer more elevating worlds of the good and creative, of sweetness and light, of encapsulated optimism eternal, do exist, I think.
But hardly within the realms of human activity I unexpectedly entered into in 1971, when I was thirty-eight years old.

The above nutshell viewpoint has been rendered pointedly based not on philosophical speculation, but based on my intimate and long-term experience. The softer more elevating worlds DO NOT really exist, or are only incidental, within the inner social workings of psychical research, parapsychology, science, skepticism, philosophy, politics, government, the American intelligence community -- and clearly DO NOT exist within the realms of international espionage.
All of those topics can be inspiring, of course, and redolent with creative purposes. But what is inspiring and what is real are two different matters.

Although I was not quite of the conviction back then in 1971, my conviction today is that the inner social workings of all of those realms are largely dehumanizing and DEADLY ones, realms in which the individual is virtually insignificant -- unless he or she has the intellectual and experiential wherewithal to cope with what needs to be coped with.
In those deadly or at least certainly difficult realms, the only thing that matters is who has achieved a modicum of imagination, clever inventiveness, and power which are absolutely necessary if one is to survive more than three months in any of them other than as an expendable asset.

I readily admit that the above is a rather grim vision of things, and that many positive-optimist types will not believe it can be substantiated or justified.
But you might wish to consider the following. The modern culture provided no place for psychics except, if at all, in the Fringes. And certainly the modernist mainstreams rejected not only them, but the entire topic of psi and psi experiencing -- and, as well, took active educational and deprogramming measures to ensure the cultural continuance of that rejection into perpetuity.

If nothing else, the American intelligence community is VERY mainstream. The odds of a "psychic" (as I unfortunately was to be dubbed) of even entering into the realms of mainstream-structured international espionage, much less surviving for some eighteen YEARS within the abundant machinations -- well, such odds were nonexistent as of 1971.
And, as I will CLEARLY show ahead, the survival of a psychic within the on-going machinations in, of all places, parapsychology are also almost nil -- even if any such psychic does demonstrate successful experimental results.

The answer, then, to the most salient question of survival within such on-going, psi-negative circumstances has to do with emerging not as a "psychic" -- but rather emerging with the characteristics of lean, mean fighting machines well endowed with substantial wherewithal's to become such a creature.
And so those of my autobiographical elements which contributed to such substantial wherewithals should be established. Unless these are forthrightly presented, much ahead will not be clear at all.
And it is in this aspect that, with some embarrassment, I have to toot my own horn.

To enter into my autobiographical situation vis-a-vis the real story of remote viewing, it is necessary to distinguish three important elements which will escape cognizance if they are not pointed up.

The FIRST of those elements concerned the NEEDS of the intelligence community when it was forced by Soviet circumstances to take an interest in so-called "psychic phenomena," an interest admittedly controversial within the conventional Western mainstreams.
Within the scope of this first element, it was determined that the NEEDS consisted of TWO factors. And it was those two factors which constituted the second and third elements having to do with the intermixing of my own autobiographical situation with the "sexy" story of the intelligence community interests.
Thus, the SECOND element consisted of the need to determine if, indeed, ESP or any other psi factor really did exist; and THIRD, if such really existed, to determine if such could be refined and enhanced enough to be utilized for various APPLIED purposes within the cold war or international syndromes.

I will now summarize the three elements on the chance that I've not made them clear enough, or on the chance that some few may be too dense to clearly recognize them.
(1) The intelligence community was forced by Soviet circumstances to take an interest in the topic of psi which was largely ridiculed and debunked within American mainstream contexts. To manage this interest, two needs were paramount.
(2) As a first step in fulfilling this "novel interest" (as it was often called), there was a NEED to confirm if psi powers really did exist.
(3) If the answer was positive, or even minimally positive, then there was a NEED quickly to discover whether any developed and applied form of psi was possible, and which, if so, constituted a threat potential to the nation.

Now, regardless of what many might think of the intelligence community, its overall mission is quite well recognized and supported -- to protect and defend the security of this nation by identifying all threats to it. That the intelligence community often messes up in this regard does not reduce the importance of the essential mission.
As I will show in the narrative which begins in the next chapter, for some time certain elements within the intelligence community had been tracking and monitoring the realm of parapsychology.
As of 1969, the only thing parapsychology had to offer was that certain psi effects existed on a statistically minimal basis -- and clearly nothing which resembled a potential "threat" had been discovered within parapsychology. And so the general overview was that psi was incidental and threatless.
But IF this was the case, what, then, were the Soviets up to and why did whatever it was involve such enormous funding within the commitments of the KGB and etc.

Since the sum of conventional parapsychological wisdom in the United States, even in the entire Western world, apparently held no answers here, it became obvious that conventional parapsychological wisdom had to be bypassed -- and, in fact, needed to be ignored in favor of fresh, novel and unique insights into the overall situation.
And, although I had not the slightest clue at the time, this situation constituted the American circumstances which shortly were to suck me into the two major needs of the intelligence community: DID psi really exist; and COULD any element of it be developed into an applications-ready format.

Obviously, this "effort" (as it was called) needed to depart from Western stereotyped concepts of psi and parapsychology. This meant two things, the first of which led to the second.
First, that the needs of the intelligence community could not be subcontracted or downloaded back into parapsychology, the very realm which had no answers to the needs in spite of its long history.
And so, second, the intelligence community would have to establish its own in-house program, and base it on novel approaches in the light of its own problem, not in the light of the on-going but largely fruitless parapsychology circumstances.
And here I might mention that if anyone, especially in parapsychology, did or does not now think that the intelligence community thought parapsychology useless and non-productive, I will definitely put that into perspective in the narrative.

The point I've been laboring to make is that the autobiographical circumstances of my own life by 1971-72 had developed in such a way as to integrate with the first need of the intelligence community. Thereafter, largely because of my accumulated background knowledge, my big mouth, and my fighting, attacking vicissitudes, my own circumstances were commandeered on behalf of the intelligence community's second need.
I must point up, though, that before the 1971-1972 date I was very much a live-let-live, sweetness-and-light person much charmed and fascinated with the inspirational aspects of psi, psychical research and parapsychology. But I had been mostly a devoted armchair researcher of those topics -- and quite well encapsulated, as most people are, entirely in my own visions and "realities."

But it was because I had been a devoted, and thorough, armchair researcher not only regarding psi, but regarding life in general, that I was prepared when the time came.
It is this preparedness which is the answer to the question of why and how I survived, and it is this preparedness which constitutes my autobiographical parts which are germane to the real story of remote viewing and all that came to be involve.

I will attribute this preparedness to two factors which were vital to my life.
The first has to do simply with the fact that I was a bookworm from the age of four -- and the staggering amount of books I consumed after that.
The second factor has to do with the fact that I worked at a very high echelon during my Army years; and then for twelve years at the United Nations.
Within the ambiance's of those two "posts," so to speak, I was able to witness and thus learn first-hand much of what goes on in the real world, as contrasted to visions of it from someone's superficial, illusion-making armchair.
Without the combination of those two factors, I would have been permanently smashed very early. Indeed, as we shall see in the narrative, I WAS smashed several times -- but arose from the pulp with teeth longer than before.
There was also a third factor -- one which might be called "daring do." But I'll let that one unfold in the narrative itself.

My birth event took place at 2:30 a.m. on 14 September 1933 in Telluride, Colorado, then a tiny town quite isolated high in the vitalizing splendors of the Rocky Mountains.
Telluride was hardly populated until about 1880, and then at first only by prospectors and prostitutes avidly following the lure of gold in them thar mountains. Thereafter, when the gold and silver played out, there were still lead, zinc, and other lesser metals to be obtained by mining companies who had the economic feasibility to get them.
Telluride was then occupied only by miners struggling to make a living for their families -- and a few others which made their living off of THEM.
Isolated back then with a population of about 210, today Telluride is a posh, very expensive, very over-crowded resort town -- because of its amazing and remarkably beautiful surroundings, perhaps some of the most beautiful in the United States.

And if there is one fundamental element to my psyche, it was this utter beauty and the aesthetic realization of it. I was transfixed by it from my earliest memories -- and, I feel, not only observed it but participated in it at some deep fundamental level.
High peaks and multicolored cliffs, waterfalls cascading, slopes of forest pines and aspens, crystalline air, clouds, rainbows, flowers, berries and abundant wild life -- all majestic, all virtually overpowering. All somewhat scared here and there by mines and remnants of them, but utterly gorgeous anyway.

And it was this beauty that made me very sensitive to its opposite -- ugliness. And it is because of this that I have studied the elements of ugliness as well as the elements of beauty -- not only in their material manifestations, but beauty and ugliness of mind and psychosocial behavior as well.
With regard to this, be pleased to refer back to the stunning observation of Leonardo da Vinci I have selected and placed at the beginning of this book.

All things considered, my childhood was wonderful -- as has been, all things again considered, my whole life. And I will admit that in this I feel I have been blessed.
I was precocious. I read my first dictionary when I was three or thereabouts. When Mom was talked into buying thirty volumes of the ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA from a traveling salesman, I had them all read, entry to entry, by the time I got into kindergarten.
So I was a problem in kindergarten. I used big words when my peers were struggling with the alphabet and pictures of elephants, sheep and fishes. I could already distinguish between elephants of India and those of Africa, while the teacher didn't know there was a difference.

I was also a problem to just about everyone -- because I constantly experienced "paranormal and extrasensory" stuff.
No one was prepared to deal with such experiences very well -- except my maternal grandmother who had experienced certain kinds of them herself.

Not even she, though, used the term "psychic" because no one had ever heard of it in Telluride -- except the Sunday School teacher and the Minister. The latter warned me, practically in a whisper, that it represented something abnormal. And this example of attempted mind-deprogramming is perhaps why I've hated the term "psychic" to this day -- in addition to the fact that it has no legitimate definition.
So Gram and I used other words -- natural words, not artificial, such as sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing things that others apparently didn't or couldn't or didn't want to.

Very little in the way of culture-making managed to find itself imported into the isolated surrounds of Telluride.
But the 1920s and the 1930s were the age of "normalcy," of behavioral and psychological normalcy. And this culturizing factor DID make its way up to Telluride.
But whatever "the normal" consisted of, it had to be contrasted to what was "abnormal" -- and of that there was plenty to choose from even in Telluride.
Many tests were given to find out if someone was normal or not. Those tests created various kinds of wide-spread crises from which, in my opinion, this nation has never really recovered.
The fear of being discovered to be abnormal is still a devitalizing and defeating social phenomenon trend.

As a child, I didn't actually comprehend the theoretical distinctions between the normal and the abnormal. And it wasn't until my college years that I discovered that the normal consisted of the lowest common denominators of what most people were -- and, most importantly, are NOT. In other words, is "everyone is doing it, then it must be normal and acceptable." On the other hand, if "everyone is NOT doing it, then it must be abnormal and non-acceptable."
Thus, most people are not psychic, and so to have psychic experiences is abnormal.

But as a child I made a valiant effort myself to identify what was normal and abnormal. Thus, I got very good at noticing what seemed to be abnormal -- and which tended to be more interesting than the normal.
Prostitutes, for example, were held to be abnormal. In my childhood, Telluride yet possessed three of those professional creatures who inhabited the two red-light houses down by the ice ponds. Naturally, I wished to examine them, the three ladies involved being quite amused with my questions and inquiries.
It was also considered abnormal to have an interest in death -- so I examined decomposing carcasses of wildlife and was fascinated by the mortician and his supply of caskets stored in a dank building on Telluride's Main Street.

It was also considered abnormal NOT to read the Bible. So I did that several times -- but went one step further by making diagrams of various parts of the Bible, including the Genesis story and family lineages.
It was considered abnormal to have any interest in Eastern mysticism. But Telluride, so deficit in many other culturizing things, had a quite good library run by the Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Emma Kuhlem, who was also the town and county clerk and one of the proverbial pillars of almost everything else.

It was my goal to read everything in the library. It contained a dusty copy of THE BOOK OF TAU by the ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tsu. Emma wouldn't let me check it out because I was "too young to understand it." So I stole it, read it several times, and made box-and-flow diagrams of what the ancient philosopher was saying.
I returned the book openly, along with the diagrams. A terrific ruckus took place -- but Emma finally decided to "feed" my gargantuan "appetite for knowledge." I thereafter owed her a lot -- a wise and cultured woman originally from Sweden, marooned in a high mountain town by virtue of having married a miner.

I was seven when I first studied THE BOOK OF TAU. Today, psychologists say that kids do their final imprinting at that age. If so I imprinted on that book -- rather, upon the wonderful and beautiful life-making philosophy it contained.
I also imprinted upon the awe-inspiring stories of psi and ESP in the Bible, for I did notice those, and of which there are many -- and some of those stores were even slightly consistent with my own direct experiencing of certain psychic faculties. [See, for example, Heron, Laurence Tunstal. ESP IN THE BIBLE. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974.]
In the Bible, all ESP-like episodes serve to do God's work. Hence, in the future when I heard Christians say that ESP is the work of the devil, I knew they were manufacturing psychological ugliness. When I later learned that modern science, psychology and psychiatry held that psi emanates from a sick mind, I drew a similar conclusion regarding them.

I had what was called an "overactive mind" as a child. This worried my family and others, especially when taken beyond the reading dictionaries, encyclopedias and whatnot.
I also liked to take things apart and put them back together again. For example, not just Tinker Toys, but the kitchen stove, the plumbing, the telephone and clocks -- everything including, to everyone's horror, the piano. I got it all back together, but my Dad had to pay $40 to get it retuned.
But I was consumed by discovering how things worked, and was serious and determined in this regard. I made charts and graphs and drawings. Most people don't care how things work. They just use them.

And herewith was the beginning of those illustrations and graphs and box-and-flow charts which many years later were dragged from Stanford Research Institute into the Pentagon and DIA headquarters and presented to their oversight committees and consulting scientists. Diagrams of how, theoretically at least, the so-called "psychic mind" functions.

And herewith was the beginning of my conviction that the quickest way of LEARNING anything was via visual illustrations and diagrams -- not by linear words, which anyway appeal only to the left-hemisphere of the brain and which is said to be the "seat of the intellect."

When I was five, one of my mother's sisters, having noticed my penchant for drawing, gave me a set of oil paints and a few small canvasses.
The SMELL of the fresh canvas and paints brought about an instantaneous "peak experience," one among the very many I underwent as a child. I "knew" that I would devote my life to art and painting -- and indeed I mostly have, and the SMELL still is to me one of the most wonderful things ever.
I could create what I wanted on the canvas -- and this brought to the fore an interest in how and why anyone could create anything. And this accounts for the beginning of my life-long interest in the "creative and inventive processes," a topic I have researched and studied more than anything else.

Via paths and circumstances too complex to include here, the topic of creative processes and the topic of psi experiencing came together, rather thunderously, in 1955.
I was then in basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and in the base library I set about reading Aldous Huxley's DOORS OF PERCEPTION [1954] which was the rage at the time.
This book is commonly reviewed as triggering the modern controversy on the relationship between drug experience and mysticism, and which is partly true of it.
But it is also much more, and which is directly implied by its title.

This book was the beginning of a watershed for me. For, you see, in spite of my voracious appetite for reading and bookworming study, no one else had ever said it, nor had it dawned on me that perceptions have "doors" -- and that those doors can be OPEN or SHUT.

This led almost immediately to the understanding that people probably have all kinds of perceptions. But the doors to them can either be open or shut.
This REVELATION, for that is what it was, that both the creative processes AND psi experiencings are, at base, almost certainly a matter of what doors of perception are open or shut in given individuals.

I was stunned by this concept, and still am. Thereafter, as a matter of serious research and amusement, I set about observing all kinds of people with regard to seeing or sensing which of their doors of perception are open or shut.
Statistically speaking, of course, there are more shuts than opens. This is something you can determine for yourself if you take interest in observing others with the goal of watching which of their doors of perceptions are open or shut.

Therein lies a very great tale to be told, and some full part of the saga and soap opera of remote viewing resides within it.

In 1959, I began an arduous study of a field which had interested me, but for which I'd had little time or available resources. This was the field of sociology, very big during the first half of the twentieth century.
This epoch had indeed been proclaimed as the epoch of progressive social experimentation, and sociologists had ardently devoted themselves to designing and planning such progressive endeavors -- and which endeavors had achieved very large governmental funding.
The age of normalcy had consisted of one such progressive endeavor, for if it could be found out what was normal, then sociologists could plan for that normalcy to be socially reinforced.

Serious cracks in the sociological "egg" had begun appearing in the 1940s, and the field was certainly considered as failed by the mid-1960s.
And especially so, when in 1968 the Sex Revolution and the Hippie Anti-Military-Establishment Revelation too place -- two powerful sociological phenomena which nary a government-funded sociologist had anticipated.

Soon after that time, the field of sociology was generally replaced by the new field of futurology, whose exponents took over the planning and designing regarding what societies should prepare to become. Futurology, so vitally alive in the 1960s and 1970s, has itself now "failed" -- as will be briefly mentioned in the narrative ahead.

Since sociology's failure, various sociologists themselves have commented upon the reasons for its decline -- essentially that sociology attempted to move forward based exclusively upon experimental theories, not upon direct observation of people and their social patterns. [See, for example, Horowitz, Irving Louis. THE DECOMPOSITION OF SOCIOLOGY. New York, 1993, Oxford University Press.]

To this I might add that during the two second decades of this century, sociologists and psychologists had opined that human nature didn't exist -- and was a myth redolent with superstitions. Later futurology also ignored this topic.
This was in keeping with the scientific supposition that inherent behavioral attributes and patterns such as might be ascribed to "human nature" didn't exist, and so the human nature "fabric" didn't exist either.
Man, it was said, was his own vehicle, and by logic and reason could self-improve without taking cognizance of the myth of human nature -- which, after all, contained many destructive attributes.
Those destructive attributes, the early sociologists said, arose from faulty nurturing, not from any inherent nature.

All in all, the literature of sociology is quite boring and turgid. But my interest in it was stimulated by an idea of my own which amused me.

If open and closed doors of perception existed, then there ought to be a sociology of open and closed doors of perception.

In this sense, the sociologies of open and closed doors of perception ought to be dramatically different -- and, as well, have meaning to creative perceptual processes as well as to psychic perceptual ones.
Both of these vital areas are, after all, entirely entwined with the parameters, vicissitudes and problems of PERCEPTIONS.
In this sense, I needed to achieve a relatively good reading background in sociology itself and set about doing so. Sociology, in its purest context, involves every aspect of the circumstances which everyone finds themselves sucked into -- in some form or another.

And whether one's perceptions are open or closed regarding this is an entirely relevant matter.

I never planned to do anything with the sometimes wobbly results of my excursions into sociology -- save, perhaps, to one day write a book about the sociologies of open and closed perceptions. I considered the whole of this an interesting avocation only.

However, I had accumulated enough information in this regard to recognize, when in 1971 I began meeting up with:
The sociologies of psychical and parapsychological researchers;
The sociologies of various scientific disciplines;
The sociologies of skeptics;
The sociologies of Silicon Valley;
The sociologies of government-funded research companies;
The sociologies of the American and Soviet intelligence communities; and, as well,
Some of the many sociologies of the international community world-wide.

Without some kind of background in this regard, no one can really diplomatically walk where even angels might fear tread.

Thus was my mind more or less prepared when the year of 1971 arrived, although I didn't at all realize it.
But one more important autobiographical factor needs to be entered into this brief review.

Until the circumstances which commenced in 1971, I was an introvert, as most bookworms are, and doubly assured of this since various psychological tests I had undergone during my academic years established as much.
In many ways I was an ivory-tower type, certainly not extrovertish, eclectic in reading and study, but with little interest in forcing my presence onto anyone.
As of 1971, I considered this aspect my life's greatest deficit and failure -- but had to be content with living with it. As already mentioned, I was a live-and-let-type, the resignation-pose most introverts must take in order not to be damaged.

Which is to say, I was not yet transformed into a lean, mean fighting machine on behalf of what I was later to call the superpowers of the human bio-mind.