Lawrence LeShan: Clairvoyant Realty

Lawrence LeShan received a Ph.D. in Human Development from the University of Chicago and taught at Roosevelt University and the New School for Social Research. He conducted parapsychological research in the 1960s and 1970s and in 1974 published How to Meditate. In the 1980s LeShan shifted his focus to psychotherapy for cancer patients. LeShan was one of the first scholars to write about the similar experiences of mediums and mystics. In this book he adds insights from quantum mechanics to his reflections.

LeShan begins by quoting the early twentieth century medium, Mrs. Eileen Garrett, as saying: On clairvoyant levels there exists simultaneity of time, and the clairvoyant message may concern future events and future relationships which today seem impossible, or meaningless to the person to whom they are revealed. Garrett also affirms: What I see in clairvoyance is neither good nor is it right. It is. It is inevitable.

LeShan identifies this extraordinary knowing as the Clairvoyant Reality: “the best way is not the way of the senses. Since everything—including the observers (you and I)—is primarily and fundamentally related to and a part of everything else—then the best way of gaining information about something is to accept this ‘oneness,’ to accept that you and it are the same thing, and then you ‘know’ about it in the same way you ordinarily know about yourself through self-observation.”[1]

LeShan quotes Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), an English Anglo-Catholic writer on Christian mysticism: “The act of contemplation is for the mystic a psychic gateway: a method of going from one level of consciousness to another. In technical language it is the condition under which he shifts his ‘field of perception’ and obtains his characteristic outlook on the universe.”[2]

In Garrett’s words: there are certain concentrations of consciousness in which awareness is withdrawn as far as possible from the impact of all sensory perceptions. What happens to us at this time is that, as we withdraw from the environing world, we relegate the activities of the five senses to the field of the subconscious, and seek to focus awareness (to the best of our ability) in the field of the superconscious—the timeless, spaceless field of the as-yet-unknown.”[3]

Psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein writes: “I have come to the conclusion that man always lives in two spheres of experience: the sphere in which subject and object are experienced as separate and only secondarily related, and another one in which he experiences oneness with the world.”

 

1 Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist, 35-39.

2 Ibid., 42-43. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, 4th ed. (Methuen & Co., 1912), 49.

3 LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist, 57.

 

Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal (The Viking Press, 1974).