The Narrative is the Thing:  The Story of “Necessary Spirit”  and Psi[1]   By Rhea A. White   pub: EHE Network, Inc., (2nd ed., 1999) Copyright©2001 EHE Network, Inc. www.ehe.org

Back in the 1950s, when I worked at the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, I steeped myself in J. B. Rhine’s writings. What I valued most were his more personal statements, which he often expressed in the editorials he wrote for almost every issue of the Journal of Parapsychology. In the December 1954 issue he wrote one titled “The Research is the Thing,” (Rhine , 1954). In it he urged parapsychologists not to get sidetracked by conference attendance, philosophical discussions, and writing theoretical articles but to concentrate on experiments. Experiments formed the basis of the field itself; without which there wasn’t much to be delivered and discussed at conferences. He was not against conferences and discussions, as such, but he felt that in such a small field they could usurp a disproportionate amount of a researcher’s time unless he or she used self-discipline and set priorities.           I valued editorials such as this one and also the “purple patches” in his books, which were aimed at the general reader, because in this medium he revealed himself, his motivation for being a parapsychologist, and the meaning of psi for him personally. Looking back on it from the viewpoint of what I have learned from studying exceptional human experience (EHE), I would say that the early ESP and PK experiments themselves served as EHEs for J. B. Rhine. An EHE begins as an anomalous experience that may or may not be capable of being submitted to the objective truth-testing methods of physicalistic empirical science. Even if it is not, sometimes the experience will not go away even though a scientist points out a plausible counterexplanation or the experiencer is not actively thinking about it or may even forget it for a time, until it comes to mind again, never staying away for long. Somehow it has touched something deeply personal and/or transpersonal in the experiencer. Often it hints that something “more” is involved, something hidden yet subtly sensed, though there may be periods when the experiencer is unaware of it and may even forget it. The hidden meaning is only a possibility. This second stage, in which the person is drawn, and in some cases even guided, by his or her experience, often unaccountably, is what I call an exceptional experience (EE). This is because it usually is an experience the person has not previously had so it stands out from all others, and the hint of personal/transpersonal meaning makes the experiencer him- or herself also feel singled out. Or, it may remind the experiencer of a similar experience, which is now enhanced by the subsequent one, and vice versa.           By personal I mean that what appears to be involved, after it becomes conscious, is the more individual aspects of the person—those that make him or her unique. By transpersonal I mean the deepest layers of the human being where we are connected, and beyond that, one with all aspects of our individual selves; other humans, up to and including the human species as a whole, other life forms, Earth, the cosmos, and beyond and within all, the divine. The initiating experience becomes an EHE when the experiencer becomes aware of one or more of these forms of connectedness and is changed by the process of integrating and living from it (or them). The experiencer’s consciousness is raised and deepened in the course of heeding, working on, and potentiating the meaning of the experience. Sometimes it happens almost immediately, as with conversion or some NDEs, but usually it transpires only often after long and arduous work in which the experiencer learns many new things about him- or herself and about the nature of “reality.” Initially, some time may pass before the process, which Suzanne Brown and I call the EHE process, begins. Some only begin in earnest after they realize the experience won’t go away but keeps prompting him or her to do something about it.           I add human to exceptional experience at this point because the experience reveals some aspect of the experiencer’s human nature that until that experience was not even guessed, or if known, the person was unable to give it much credence, and thus it is an EHE.  A hallmark of an EHE is that the meaning revealed is an aspect of a new paradigm or worldview that the experiencer glimpses while immersed in his or her experience or recollections and extensions of it or when it combines in some way with one or more other experiences. I call it the experiential paradigm (White, 1998b) because it has to be experienced to be known, unless one has already become aware of aspects of it based on earlier experiences.           The early experiments in which Rhine and others working with him “discovered” high-scoring subjects, including Hubert Pearce, who obtained 25 correct calls in a single run, or 100% accuracy, as well as several others, were reported in Rhine’s first book, Extra-Sensory Perception (1934). I believe these striking results were not simply empirical anomalies for J. B. Rhine. They functioned as EEs because what they revealed to him was that human nature contains an element that transcends space (in ESP), time (in precognition), matter (in PK), and possibly even death (in survival-type experience). Moreover, he was personally involved, because he had  “been there” and observed what happened with his own eyes. He had designed the experiments originally, with the help of others. He was not the first to use cards as targets, but he made significant innovations in the technique, even though Karl Zener, a Duke psychologist, suggested the five symbols that were later to become known as “ESP symbols.” Most importantly, Rhine was the major experimenter in the early research, so he was intimately involved in the testing process, sometimes also serving as subject. With the development of the ESP test Rhine believed he had found a way to capture in the laboratory the essence of the psychical experiences people have in daily life, but under conditions he could control and with results to which a specific p value could be assigned, which made comparisons between conditions and results of other experiments possible. Finally, as he was later to realize (to be explained), he himself, without any sensory or rational contrivance, played a primary role in actively producing the results in a way that did not vitiate their evidentiality.           With the ESP and PK tests, he thought he held the keys to changing the human world for the better. The degree of his caring for humankind and his desire for the betterment of all appeared to be endless and relentless. I know this not only from his writings but from many talks we had during the four years I worked at the Duke Lab. The experimental results moved him and spoke to him the way dreams and visions speak to others. In the ESP and PK tests he had found what I call his Project of Transcendence—one that was both the outgrowth and capstone of his background in religious studies, biology, psychology, and his research with mediums, high-scoring subjects, college students, and his own children. ESP and PK testing provided his pioneer spirit with an immense space in which to move and grow. Perhaps he had even found the skeleton key that would open all other doors, as he tried to show in a later book, New World of the Mind ( Rhine , 1953).           The “new world” of the title underlines the large scope and grand reach of his motivation and desire, which was surely the equal to any of the great physical explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries.  It also confirms my guess that he had glimpsed the Experiential Paradigm, because in this book he tried to determine whether what he and others had discovered about psi might provide an outlook that “changes distinctly and profoundly the way we look at the world we already know; when it exerts a permanent influence on our way of life” (p. x).  This sentence is certainly in line with what I have written about EHEs (as data) and the Experiential Paradigm (as the new outlook), including the element of life change.           I know I owe a great debt to J. B. Rhine, who was a seminal teacher in my mid-20s and figured often in inner dialogues for many years after I left the Parapsychology Laboratory in December 1958, but I did not realize how much until I wrote this chapter and for the first time in many years looked at his New World of the Mind, which came out the year before I went to the Parapsychology Laboratory. During my interview with Rhine in Durham in June 1954, I had lunch with J. B. and Louisa Rhine. J. B. peppered me with questions about what I thought of his new book. The aim of the book was to show how the data of experimental parapsychology had a bearing on each of the natural sciences, medicine, religion, and the conduct of life. In looking at it after all these years, I see it is very similar to what I have been saying about exceptional human experience, except I have been most interested in the subjective aspects, and he was mostly concerned with objectively verifiable data.           Many of J. B.’s more empirically inclined colleagues did not think much of his highly speculative book, and I have invited similar criticisms of my own speculations.  It is nice to discover at this late date that I have such distinguished company, right at the heart of parapsychology, from the man who gave this English major a chance to become a scientist. I do not think the J. B. Rhine I knew would think unkindly of my current efforts, even though, as I hope to show, I no longer think the typical parapsychological experiment is “the thing.” I also hope to show there is still plenty of room in parapsychology for research, but with a new twist.           As to the psi testing situation serving as a project of transcendence for J. B. Rhine, I define a project of transcendence (PT) as a long-term repetitive activity that provides a person with frequent opportunities to experience EEs. This is because within PTs, experiences are more likely to be experienced as exceptional rather than simply anomalous from the beginning because they occur in a context that is already personally and transpersonally meaningful, which is why the person engaged in the project to begin with (White, 1997b). Examples of PTs are serious participation in a specific sport; teaching; meditation; working in a hospice; volunteering to help others in a project extending over a long time, such as cleaning up a stretch of road or river; taking up an art or craft; going on a pilgrimage to a distant place; a daily running regimen; taking part in an Outward Bound program; or climbing high mountains. The meaning of an EE that occurs in such contexts is much more quickly potentiated, again because it takes place within a framework that usually has a history of people having had EHEs, which the neophyte learns as he or she becomes familiar with the history and lore of the specific project.  In my own case, as a reference librarian, which I was for 30 years in addition to being a parapsychologist, I remember my excitement in graduate library school when I read in the practical handbook on doing reference work that answers to reference questions may be expected to turn up anywhere, even in dreams.           That Rhine viewed the various forms of psi tests as projects of transcendence is clear from the following passage from the same editorial: “Each worker has to identify himself with a project and make it more or less his own creation if he is to generate the conative force required to carry it through to completion” (Rhine, 1954, p. 241).[2]           From those humble beginnings, experimental types and formats proliferated as the years passed, and J. B. was witness to them, and to some extent, a primary agent of their growth for nearly 50 years. He saw the basic ESP test go from crude cards whose symbols even when face down could be read sensorially under certain conditions to computer-randomized targets not susceptible to sensory cues or rational inference.           I shared Rhine ’s vision. In a sense, it was a vicarious EHE for me, because I was convinced of the reality of which he wrote and spoke, even though I had not personally experienced it. Nonetheless, it influenced my worldview and my personal and professional motivation. He and I had several long, intense conversations about the importance of the meaning of psi, which I believe for both of us was that it revealed a corner of a new world, that of the Experiential Paradigm, in which time, space, matter, and perhaps even death are not barriers to human beings.  Today these features are often referred to in contexts outside of parapsychology as “nonlocal” and/or “transpersonal.”           Late in 1958, when I told J. B. I felt the time had come for me to leave the Parapsychology Laboratory, he appealed to me to stay because the search for psi was so vitally important and parapsychology needed people like me. I tried to tell him the reason I was leaving was not to abandon the search but to continue it in another direction (I had in mind getting into Jungian psychology in New York City , the heart of analytical psychology in the U.S. at that time). He saw this as coming at psi from the wrong direction—one that did not involve experiments, thus what I proposed to do flew in the face of his dictum that  “the research is the thing!” I replied that my search might lead me back to doing experiments from a new, more productive angle. He was skeptical, having corresponded with Jung; but I felt his knowledge of Jung was superficial. He had not really read Jung, whereas I had read him for years, owned most of his works, and was a charter subscriber to the Journal of Analytical Psychology. I was then deep in Jung’s volumes describing his alchemical research, in which the experimenter’s own self was not only intimately involved in the alchemical process but could even be said to be its object. I felt then and still do now that somehow parapsychology is akin to the alchemical opus, or the great work, which involves self-transformation as an integral part of the outer alchemical process. I think parapsychology is the science with the best chance to make the human turn from purely empirical objectivity to a way of learning and knowing that is an amalgam of individual uniqueness and something generalizable that is simultaneously “out there” and “in here.” In this new view of science the individual scientist knowingly delves into both “objective” reality and his or her subjectivity, and what he or she hopes to learn is something as yet unknown that enhances the collective consciousness of human beings with the scientist as the first person to become aware of it, at least within the then current, or more likely, still forthcoming, worldview. At the same time, it moves a specific discipline forward, and beyond that, the human species as a whole. Many parapsychologists still wish to rule out the experimenter effect in parapsychology, even though they might grant it exists, one of the most eloquent being Rex Stanford (1981), himself a very successful experimenter. I think it and the related sheep-goat effect are parapsychology’s most significant findings (White, 1976a, 1976b, 1977). If developed fully, I think that clarifying the ramifications of both would compel the attention of other scientists and the general public.           However, it appears that quantum physics, both humanistic and transpersonal psychology, alternative medicine, holistic nursing, as well as transpersonal anthropology and near-death studies may already have captured that beachhead and are now making inroads on the mainland of science and the broader culture, so that parapsychology may have lost its chance to make a significant impact. These other disciplines have already glimpsed and sometimes work within the experiential paradigm in which parapsychological phenomena are accepted as a matter of course, without demanding “hard” evidence, though some may cite the contribution of parapsychology in a footnote. The point is that in the new paradigm that is already forming, starting with quantum physics, psi phenomena will not be viewed as anomalous but will be expected to occur as a matter of course: not anomalously but integrally, as part of the EHE process, which is a series of stages Brown and I have observed that experiencers go through, often over a period of years, as they change their identities and worldviews so that they are in line with what their EHE(s) have taught them (Brown, 1997; 1998; 2001; White, 1997d).           I believed then, and I am more convinced now, that in his early one-on-one research Rhine was unconsciously not only personally but transpersonally involved as if his work were a modern-day counterpart of the alchemical opus. I think it is this that may have contributed to his notably high success as an experimenter. Gardner Murphy, who knew him at that time, recalled "the year 1934, in which I first visited Rhine …and saw the rugged force of the demands which he made upon his co-workers and subjects. In the light of his glowing intensity, it became possible to begin to understand the accounts given in his book of the way in which he had driven some of his subjects in the demand to get extrasensory phenomena. It may well have been this intensity which produced the results—including some of the best-authenticated long distance results which we have in all this field." (1949/1950, p. 18)           Perhaps this intensity came into being because Rhine ’s motivation was rooted not only in his forceful individuality but even deeper, where mind and matter may meet inwardly as well as outwardly. Maybe that was why he was such a superb experimenter and why to him “the research” meant mainly “the experiment” and it, above all, was “the thing.” As I have pointed out, an experiment in itself was a project of transcendence for Rhine , which people usually get into as a result of spontaneous EEs or EHEs. But for Rhine these early experiments were spontaneous and unanticipated. It is similar to the first time I hit a golf ball squarely with a 5-iron and saw it sail toward the green. I was hooked on golf on the spot. Until then I had played “at” golf desultorily, but that shot was an exceptional experience for me in that it was a “first,” and I can still recall how it felt to strike the ball squarely and the wonder I experienced as it went high and straight and right where I wanted it to go! (This was not an anomalous experience in terms of going against the tenets of the reigning paradigm, but it was what I call an anomaly of personal experience because it was the first time I had experienced it, and I wanted very much to experience it again. Anomalies of personal experience are often also potential EHEs.)           After that, golf became my project of transcendence for many years, from 1945 to 1967 or so. During those years I felt consciously that the act of hitting the ball correctly required me to change my life and to achieve a more collected state of consciousness. I saw it as a physical manifestation of my inner state. My most memorable round was 9 holes in which I played in a state of no mind. I was unconscious, whether I was driving the ball from the tee, hitting it off the fairway, or putting on the green. Everything “happened” in superb fashion without my “doing” anything. I was never to match this exceptional experience again, except for single shots widely separated in time. But I will never forget that day. It, too, was an EHE for me. As in Zen in the Art of Archery (Herrigel, 1954), I had the experience of not “doing” it; rather, “it” did it. I imagine that Rhine and his early high-scoring subjects experienced something similar during their ESP testing sessions.           After writing the past few pages about Rhine as an experimenter, I checked his long-time personal secretary Farilla David’s bibliography of his writings in the memorial volume to J. B. edited by K. R. Rao (1982), looking for relevant material I may have forgotten. I checked the index under experimenter effect, and the only contribution on this topic so important to J. B. himself was 2 pages in an article written, as one might guess, by his wife and fellow researcher, Dr. Louisa E. Rhine, who knew him best. What she says is interesting in the light of Gardner Murphy’s and my observations, and I quote her description of his dogged resolve in the face of adversity. In the course of doing so, she highlights the crux of the success of the early Duke experiments, even after making allowances for the legitimacy of some of the criticisms that were leveled at it (see Pratt, Rhine, Smith, & Stuart, 1940/1966).  She observed:             He did not know then…that those same characteristics that kept him from being diverted when the obstacles were greater than he had foreseen, could also account for his success in eliciting from his subjects, even in the unpracticed beginning of his research, the evidence that would lead to the answer of his basic question [i.e., could the recipe be found for demonstrating ESP under laboratory conditions?]….             The very seriousness and intensity with which he asked the question of his student subjects affected them with something like contagion so that they took the task he set for them in the same way. Neither teacher nor student knew that such an attitude was necessary; but once they caught the spirit and became involved, the proper attitude resulted and together they got what was then at least the promise of an answer. And as it seems now, they got it because the spirit which they brought to it supplied what one could call the “yeast,” the ferment necessary in this recipe for a psi experiment.             Later when other experimenters often failed to duplicate the results, even though they followed carefully all the points of technique J. B. had described, they were baffled; and for a time and to an extent, J. B. was too. But the fact was that in this recipe the “yeast,” the necessary spirit, was not mentioned. I went back then to the account of the tests reported in that first book and found not the slightest mention of it. (L. E. Rhine, 1982, pp. 5-6)             The reason it wasn’t mentioned is that J. B. himself, as L. E. Rhine points out, was not conscious of it. In a sense, her observations confirm my hypothesis that his motivation was far deeper than his conscious mind was aware. Partly, this chapter is about the motive generally known as vocation or calling, in which the person involved is aware of moving toward his or her destination as if on a wave, but the depths from which that wave springs are unknown. EHEs could be considered as uprushes from those depths, which if consciously surrendered to and ridden, can carry a person farther than those not so caught up can even dream. I think this was the case with J. B. Rhine, and I agree with Louisa Rhine that only someone with the drive and degree of caring of a J. B. Rhine could have put parapsychology on the world map. We are indebted to her for telling the full story for posterity, once she herself became aware of it.           Parapsychology today is built on a post-Rhinean base thought to be more objective and purely scientific than in the past. But I think the field is in danger of playing in the shoals and shallows, blissfully unaware of or else doggedly ignoring the depths required to really get inside our data at “the only places in the world in which we can catch real fact in the making” (see the context of this partial quote from William James (1902/1978, p. 492) in a passage given in full at the close of this article).           I am suggesting here that all of us have vocations, but only a few of us are consciously aware of them, and some of the latter deny them. EHEs are the royal road to a sense of vocation, but some people choose not to or are afraid to potentiate the meaning of their EEs.           Rhine was no longer conducting experiments when I arrived at the Duke Lab. He was busy administering the lab, directing the research, raising funds, and taking his message to the public and scholars in other fields. As new researchers came to the lab to conduct the actual experiments, they did not have Rhine’s EHE of pioneering the psi test. By the mid-1950s, experiments were primarily done with groups in contrast to Rhine’s intensive work with individuals. Score levels dropped to just above or below mean chance expectation, but if they were contributed by enough people, they could still be statistically highly significant. Mainly psychologists joined the staff, and they were used to “running” human subjects the way they had run rats. Their motivation was to connect ESP and PK to mainline psychology by studying personality correlates and finding connections between various attitudes and psi test results. If anything, they wanted to reduce the possibility of an experimenter effect (Stanford, 1981), but it still cropped up unexpectedly in the results of many experiments (Kennedy & Taddonio, Palmer, 1997; 1978; White, 1976a, 1976b, 1977).  For most, this type of research question did not call upon what L. E. Rhine refers to as “the necessary spirit.”           Rhine , however, remained interested in the role of the experimenter, and I believe he began to elaborate on his own EHE, which is what every EHEer must do to keep it alive and growing. He began to realize that high-scoring subjects were “made,” not simply born, and that the way the experimenter treated the subject was all important. I shared this view, intellectually and intuitively at first, and then at first hand from exceptional experiences I had in working with Margaret Anderson. She had excelled as a high school teacher, and she came to the lab with a strong motivation to demonstrate that in teaching “more is caught than taught.” She felt psi was involved in the act of teaching, and from the student’s viewpoint, in learning. She had been a dynamic high school teacher. She was also a psi-conducive experimenter. Like Rhine, by her sheer being she provided the conditions for individuals to score when she worked with single subjects, but she also worked her magic with groups, and sometimes at a distance.           When J. G. Van Busschbach, a Superintendent of Schools in Holland who had conducted experiments in several Dutch schools where teacher-student GESP tests yielded a statistically significant positive result (a group CR of 2.7) J. B. Rhine invited him to come to the Duke Lab to oversee an attempted replication of his research in American classrooms. In Holland, Van Busschbach oversaw GESP tests administered to fifth and sixth grade administered classes by test leaders (i.e., experimenters) in Amsterdam. There were 20,190 trials with a positive deviation of chance of 174. This deviation yielded a CR = 2.79, P = 006. The Parapsychology Institute of the University of Utrecht repeated the Amsterdam methodology in with the fifth and sixth graders in Utrecht. In 26,880 trials, there were 179 hits, which yielded a CR = 2.73, P = 006. In the North Carolina 35,160 trials were carried out in schools in Burlington and Durham. Out of a total of 36,160 trials, there were 226 hits with a CR = 2.49 and P = 2.70. All of the above CRs were calculated by the Greville method. Because of the interest at Duke in the effect on the scores of the person who administered the test, we asked Van Busschbach if he had calculated the results for individual test leaders, but he had not. Because the American series was an attempted replication of the Dutch work, only the overall results were considered. My interest in the role of the experimenter continued after I left the lab. With the help of my college friend Jean Angstadt who was a teacher in a Long Island school, we conducted more experiments but did not obtain significant results. (I was never a psi-conducive experimenter.)             Van Busschbach’s (1956) report in the American repetition concluded that because of the consistent scoring rate in the Amsterdam, Utrecht, and North Carolina tests, “it seems safe to suggest … that the teacher-pupil relation in the fifth and sixth grades provides a ready-made relationship for the exercise and demonstration of ESP” (p. 80).           In Amsterdam Van Busschbach was the test administrator. In Untrecht the test administrators were one of Van Busschbach’s colleagues and two graduate assistants, but the results of all three were lumped together. Here is the breakdown for the American experiments Angstadt and I reported:             The work of Mrs. Tillitt and Miss White was not significant (Tillitt’s CR was 1 plus and White’s less than 1), and the bulk of the significant deviation was contributed by Anderson working alone or when she administered the test to the children while White instructed the teacher-agent. Anderson’s CR was 3 plus which was diminished to 2.70 when added to the results of the other two administrators. (White & Angstadt, 1965, p. 78)   [RW get actual results JP Dec 1959] [=R. White's note to herself!]           When Van Busschbach returned to Holland, he conducted an experiment using the same protocol with first and second grade classes in schools in Amsterdam and Dordrecht (Van Busschbach, 1959). A different test administrator was used in each city and although the Amsterdam results were not statistically significant the Dordrecht results were. These results increase the likelihood that a difference in the results obtained by different test leaders may have obtained in the earlier Amsterdam-Utrecht series. Margaret Anderson and I were assigned to work with him. We worked with the school principals in Durham and Burlington, North Carolina, then prepared the teachers, and then individually presented the experiment to a class at a time. A Durham school superintendent also did the same. It became apparent that only Margaret Anderson’s classes were independently significant. The school superintendent’s were suggestively positive. Mine were at chance or below.           We then brought in two other lab members to join us, and worked as two teams. I was paired with Anderson, but I took care of the details and teacher preparation, leaving her free to present the experiment to the students. Again, only Anderson’s classes scored significantly, with a CR of 3.1, the only independently significant score among the test leaders.  When we added all the results, which we had to do in our attempted repetition of Van Busschbach’s work, the CR was 2.7—so even Rhine considered it a successful repetition. To me, it clearly demonstrated the importance of the experimenter effect. Anderson never handled the targets; only the teacher did. I told the teacher what to do but I never saw the targets either. Only the teacher (and a randomizer at the laboratory who had prepared them working from a random number table) saw them. Anderson’s role was to introduce the subject of ESP to the class and explain to the students what they were to do during the test. But she had the kind of personality that made you believe you could succeed on the test, and in the case of the Van Busschbach repetition, she carried the total experiment to its successful conclusion. More importantly, she had the “necessary spirit” for demonstrating the great importance of the teacher-pupil relationship to psi research as well as in teaching. That was why she became a parapsychologist. Without her, it would not have been significant. (For fuller accounts of Anderson’s role in this series of experiments and others,  see White, 1987; White & Angstadt, 1965.)           Much later, in an invited address at the 1993 convention of the Parapsychological Association, I suggested that parapsychologists should stop experimenting and get more intimately acquainted with psi as a potential EHE before designing any more experiments (White, 1998a). For one thing, I pleaded with them to go back to whatever experiences had motivated them to enter the field. This was because I hoped there were some exceptional experiences involved that could be potentiated as EHEs in their work. Doing so consciously in the context of parapsychology research as a project of transcendence not only would spontaneously bring the experimenter closer to “the necessary spirit” that may be psi conducive, but it would be meaningful to many people who normally do not care about dry experimental reports. Everyone is interested in projects of transcendence, which may well account for the importance of sports today. A personal best or a new record for the human species or a performance that is so great it is “incredible” are all exceptional experiences, not only for the athletes involved but for the spectators who are present and even those who simply read about it or see it on TV or hear about it from friends or even strangers. All glory in the knowledge that the envelope for exceptional human performance has been pushed further back.           If beyond the experience or experiment itself the research report contained a description of the investigator’s personal and possibly even spiritual and vocational motivation that initiated the research, provided descriptions of intuitive hunches and subtle feelings as well as reasons for doing the experiment, including the period during and after its completion might result in unanticipated benefits. Letting others, especially outsiders, in on the whole story could have a vivifying effect on parapsychology as a whole. Ideally, the experimenter’s motivation would be associated with an EE or EHE and the experimental design would provide an opportunity to shed light on it. The experiment would then be functioning as a project of transcendence. I think this might be interesting to many people outside parapsychology because any question rooted deeply in another human being’s motivation is intrinsically of interest to others.           In the same 1993 address to the Parapsychological Association, I described the only conditions under which I thought an experimental approach was justified as follows:           Psi experiments themselves [should be] viewed as exceptional human experiences [,] in which case the experimenter cannot remain detached from the experiment but must existentially engage in it, and this engagement is what the experiment is really about, and so it must be made explicit in any report of the experiment. Like EHEs, such experiments should be woven into the life stories of the experiencer. At least one parapsychologist [in addition to J. B. Rhine] tried to do this: Margaret Anderson. And she was an exceptionally psi-conducive experimenter. (White, 1998c, p. 138)             I also suggested that parapsychologists would be joined to mainstream scholarship if experimenters would find a way for the experiment to capture their own personal meaning and motivation. And if, in their reports, they included accounts of their originating motivation, this would set the context for the research and so it should not be left out of the record. After all, it spearheaded the research. It is important to share all parts of the experimental “recipe,” such as how they came to design the experiment as they did, or how, in J. B. Rhine’s words, they made the experiment “their own.” (We no longer have J. B. Rhine’s legitimate reason for not initially giving his entire “recipe” immediately, although it is true that like him we may not yet be consciously aware of it. But especially if that is the case, we should expend every effort to discover and describe what we can.) Our present experimental reports, like those in most sciences, tell only the objective details. By including the personal, the subjective, and especially the feelings associated with a given experiment, we could greatly broaden and deepen the appeal of our work, not simply for purposes of gaining funds, but to utilize a deeply authentic way that would be highly educational and should help to broaden our public appeal. Our progress then might be lauded by many, and our failures draw as much commiseration as criticism. Even the latter would perhaps not be occasioned so much by animosity, as is often the case now, but offered constructively in the hope of enabling us to succeed in our endeavors. Thus, the experimental report would take on many qualities of both the personal narrative and a public relations document without doing anything more than telling the full truth of what the experiment is/was about, not only objectively but subjectively. It would serve to humanize parapsychology and banish the stereotyped image of “ghostbusters” (for a fuller discussion, see White, 1997a, 1997c).           The importance of this should not be underestimated. The genuine narratives that parapsychology could produce almost routinely would themselves be capable of changing lives and worldviews. To my mind, only quantum physics, humanistic psychology, transpersonal psychology, and transpersonal anthropology can begin to match parapsychology for narrative possibilities of knowledge. What parapsychology as a field lacks is recognition of the importance of the role that narrative, rhetoric, metaphor, and symbol can play in science. There is a burgeoning literature on narrative techniques in the social sciences, humanities, and even the helping professions. There are many in psychology who recognize it, one of the major ones being Jerome Bruner (1990; see also White, 1993). Sage Publications, which specializes in methodology books and periodicals for psychology and the social sciences, has a new series entitled “The Narrative Study of Lives” co-edited by Ruthellen Josselson and Amia Lieblich. Many new research methods for psychology are described in a pair of complementary books edited by Jonathan A. Smith, Rom Harré, and Luk Van Langenhove (1995a, 1995b), a theoretical one titled Rethinking Psychology, with a section on “The Turn to Discourse,” and the other titled Rethinking Methods in Psychology, half of which is devoted to narrative approaches. There is also the ground-breaking book by editors/contributors W. G. Braud and R. Anderson (1997) that emphasizes qualitative research techniques, many of them concerned with ways of dealing with personal narratives and EHEs. In my own case, I could not begin to glimpse the long-range influence that anomalous experiences of the parapsychological type had on people’s lives until I took the longitudinal narrative approach I called for in my first paper on EHEs (White, 1990), especially by asking people to try the EHE autobiography technique (White, 1998d).           This is not to say that the literature of parapsychology is entirely lacking in reference to narrative approaches.  Montague Ullman (1984) pointed out the importance of metaphor in the context of psi. Carl Williams (1996) examined metaphors related to paranormal experience and psi research.  David Hess (1988) offered what in effect was a narrative interpretation of the underlying assumptions of Rhinean parapsychology. Mary S. Stowell (1997a, 1997b), in a two-part report, presented “A Phenomenological Study of the Reported Experience of Presumed Precognitive Dreams and About the Meaning of the Experience” (1997a, p. 163).     Stanley Krippner (1995) pointed out that parapsychology has embraced the excesses of modernism “such as scientific dogmatism and spiritual demoralization” even though postmodern theorists have pointed out that the dismissal of the findings of parapsychology by mainline scientists may be due to the very same qualities they themselves espouse. He proposed that parapsychology should stop identifying with its oppressors and “forge alliances with organizations and movements that share awareness of the dominant paradigm’s shortcomings and inequities” (p. 1). In a similar vein, Charles Tart (1997) has expressed fear that the future of parapsychology may be jeopardized “because of some psychological and sociological factors that affect our professional actions and beliefs in a way that tends to cut us off from what is important about parapsychology” (p. 77).           Finally, W. G. Braud (1995), in a landmark paper, argued on behalf of methodologies that recognize (a) the “inseparability of the knower and the known, (b) recognized and maximized involvement of the investigator; (c) subjective, experiential factors; (s) description, understanding, and meaning; (e) emergence and downward causation; (f) naturalistic and qualitative approaches; and  (g) idiographic as well as nomothetic aims” (p. 293). He also suggested that recognizing, owning, honoring, and sharing by psi investigators of their own psychic and other exceptional experiences (a) is very much in line with the growing new paradigm, (b) may be beneficial to physical and psychological health, (c) may actually enhance the reality of psi, and (d) may ultimately be more convincing than laboratory data to other scientists. (p. 293)           In a certain sense, all of the above shortcomings of parapsychology could be called variants of settling for too small a story. At least when it was known as psychical research, parapsychology covered a broad range of subject matter and methodologies. One could say that today what once was an interesting book has been shortened to an abstract. (I hope one day it will not fit on a pin.)           J. B. Rhine, who honored quantitative research above all things, nonetheless in his writings about parapsychology told a bigger story. So did Gardner Murphy, even though at base he was a dedicated empiricist. Both men were not afraid to project beyond their data. I believe the major need of parapsychology today is to find ways to write our own stories to form the larger story of parapsychology as a whole. We need to find the areas where our seemingly dry experiments (to others, at least, perhaps partly because of the limited and spartan way they are packaged and presented) are actually streams of meaning that plunge into the headwaters of evolutionary growth and change. Only through harnessing narrative, from the story of parapsychology we present to our participants to those we use to inform the public and other scientists, will our findings move us into the vanguard of science where any parapsychologist worth his or her salt justly feels it belongs. So I urge you, all parapsychologists who have read this far, to listen to the story your heart sings about your work and shout it loudly and clearly. Don’t just hum it when no one else is around. Let the lyrics and music unfold from the depths of your being outward. I will quote William James (1902/1978) in this context, even as I did in the 1993 address:           It is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the egotistic places—they are strung upon it like so many beads…. Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling; the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we can catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done (pp. 491, 492)           By describing how, in what context, and with what motivation psi occurs when we report our quantitative results, and by weaving our personal narratives into the larger narratives of the field, both stories, large and small, would be enriched. This is the way of the EHE process. This would also entail the existential act of forsaking the ivory tower and surrendering to the pulsation of the heart of life itself as human consciousness, spearheaded by “necessary spirit” filtered through the uniqueness of many individual searchers/researchers, extends further within and without.  Parapsychology could then move forward with the gradient of life itself. For from the late 20th century into the third millennium, it is the narrative that is, and will be, the thing!   References 1 . Braud, W. G. (1994). Honoring our natural experiences. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 88, 293-308. 2 . Braud, W. G., & Anderson, R. (Eds.). Transpersonal Research Methods for the Social Sciences: Honoring Human Experience. Thousand Oaks , CA : Sage. 3 . Brown, S. V. (1997a). The EHE process: The objective standpoint. Exceptional Human Experience, 15. Special Issue: Background Papers II. The EHE Network, 1995-1998, Progress and Possibilities, 10-12. 4 . Brown, S. V. 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