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meditation. I just sat down with my candle, and after a few deep breaths, the head and shoulders of Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen, appeared to me. Mike's face was so close to me that I could easily recognize him (a situation that doesn't occur very often in my everyday life). He said nothing, but just looked at me. About twenty minutes later, I finished my meditation and looked at the paper, eager to see if I could find any correspondence between Mike Murphy and the eight horses running in the eighth race. It turned out that one of the horses was named "Friend Murph." My son Nicholas went to the track the next day and bet five dollars for me on Friend Murph. He came in first at five to one, winning twenty-five dollars!
These three personal experiences are examples of spontaneous psi. The conditions under which each occurred would all be considered psi conducive: The one with the sun in my eyes was a hypnagogic state. Another was while dreaming, and the last was meditative. I am sorry to say that these experiences, like most of my other precognitive dreams, have not taught me any deep lessons. Usually, even the highest quality precognitive events in my life have been more humorous than meaningful. Nonetheless, they have had a great impact on me by serving as constant reminders that psi is in my life, and that this is the area I should be working in. They have also been important to me because of the firsthand knowledge they have offered regarding the form and substance of psychic perception. I don't have to rely only upon other people's descriptions of their mental experiences, because I have my own personal data to work with.
For the past several years, I have been attempting to bring psi under conscious control, so it could be used with confidence. It is important that experimenters share trust, love, and grace in order to achieve reliability in psi functioning. 7 Accuracy will come from time to time without these conditions, but not with consistent reliability. We all have an idea of what is meant by trust and love. What I mean by grace is a feeling of harmony, and even more importantly, unequivocal gratitude, and the acceptance of the gift of psi among the group doing the experiment. Ken Wilber describes this kind of transparent relationship in his remarkable book, No Boundary.8
Until we have a significantly better description of the interaction of psi

 
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