Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a Grateful Dead Concert. It's 1971, the crowd is wild, psychedelic rock is in the midst of a psychic revolution and soft smooth tunes of rock and roll are slowly seeping through your core. As you enjoy the ultimate psychedelic experience, in a moment's notice the band informs you that for the last hour of the concert you will be a participant to the first national telepathic experiment.
In 1964 the Dream Laboratory in Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY began to test the possibility of extrasensory gifts in humans. Thanks to parapsychological monitoring techniques, practitioners were able to witness telepathic signals during REM sleep-wakefulness activity, otherwise known as Theta State. For the first time, fringe research was able to witness a potential telepathic message being sent..
Through the art of psychedelic rock, Stanley Krippner attempted to alter the state of consciousness of a large group of people to send telepathic messages across the country.
Six concerts were held at the Capitol Theater in N.Y., approximately 45 miles from the Dream Laboratory. In a previous ESP experiment, the Dream Laboratory found music from a Grateful Dead album to be inducing of visual experiences; increasing the ability for Psi Phenomenon such as telepathy, remote viewing, precognition or extra sensory perceptions.
The Grateful Dead’s psychedelic style came from their love of LSD, Acid and all things psychedelic. In 1966 the group lived in Los Angeles for three months with August Owsley Stanley III, the legendary supplier of the black market’s highest quality LSD. Their passion for psychedelic transmissions helped them create several records designed to be played for listeners to experience altered states of consciousness. With their mix of rock, blues, electronic, classical, country and more, their musical repertoire created a psychedelic experience that morphed your mind into an inner realm unbestowed to men. They created “music beyond idiom”, connections far beyond our material plane, oozing out sounds that travel deep within our spiritual bodies.
For this experiment, Krippner needed subjects to receive the telepathic messages. Two “psychic sensitives” that worked in previous ESP experiments were chosen as the main conductors. One of them, Malcolm Bessent, was to be located in the Dream Laboratory where the participants would intentionally send the message. Felicia Parise, however, would be in the comfort of her own home as to prove if telepathic connection works best when used with precise intention.
As the band played their psychedelic tunes, the audience morphed their states of consciousness through the velvet feel of the music. The clear ingestion of psychedelic drugs, and open hearts prepared them to send a telepathic image to Malcolm Bessent. It is without a doubt the audience experienced a moment in the outer realms of consciousness.
On the night of February 19, 1971, the audience was shown “The Seven Spinal Chakras” as a painting showing a man in the lotus position with all seven chakras shining their vivid colors. That night Bessent dreamt…
“I was very interested in…using natural energy…. I was talking to this guy who said he’d invented a way of using solar energy and he showed me this box… to catch the light from the sun which was all we needed to generate and store the energy… He was suspended in mid-air or something….. I was thinking about rocket ships…I’m remembering a dream I had… about an energy box and… a spinal column.”
The message had incredible deepness as the dream world can be an expansive realm to explore. Needless to say, the visual correlation with the time the image was sent shows a potential psychic connection.
More dream reports with Bessent showed a magical correspondence. On February 20, 1971, Magritte’s surrealistic painting “Philosophy in the Boudoir '', was shown on the screen portraying a headless woman dressed in a transparent gown. Bessent dreamt of a “little girl’s doll” and a “fantasy” about a “stopwatch on a card around my neck”.
It was found that Bessent did a damn good job connecting with the audience of the Grateful Dead, having received the images four times out of six. Interestingly enough, the other subject, Felicia Parise, didn’t do as well. It was clear that intentionality is incredibly important when sending telepathic messages, including location and name of the receiver.
If this isn’t one of those moments when life mimics the plot to a 70’s sci-fi film then I don’t know what is. However we decide to delve into the realms of altered states of consciousness, there is no doubt we have an ability to transmit telepathic messages through the collective.
Imagine how many raves you’ve attended where we induce our own altered states to find we’ve been sending telepathic messages to each other? Or sat with plant medicine to come back with universal messages from the mystical realm of the collective unconscious?
Either way, we’re only taking telepathic messages during office hours, send us a nudge!
Dr Stanley Krippner and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart talk
words by Fernanda Baraybar