How to Practice Telepathy: A Practical Guide
This guide is for people who want to actually try the protocols rather than read about them. The methods below come from the laboratory literature: the sender-receiver drawing test, the ganzfeld procedure, and the Coordinate Remote Viewing structure developed by Ingo Swann at the Stanford Research Institute.
The single most important idea in this whole guide is this: the protocol is the practice. Everything that makes these methods interesting comes from the discipline of blind targets and honest scoring. Practice without that structure produces a pleasant feeling and no information.
What You Need Before You Start
- A partner, for the telepathy exercises. Remote viewing exercises can be done alone if a third person prepares the targets.
- A pool of targets. Simple, high-contrast images work best: a lighthouse, a red bicycle, a bowl of lemons, a suspension bridge. Avoid abstract patterns.
- Opaque envelopes, or a folder on a phone that someone else controls.
- A notebook kept only for sessions. Date every page.
- A quiet room and 20 to 40 minutes.
The Rules That Make It Work
These constraints are not bureaucracy. They are the difference between a practice and a self-deception engine.
- The receiver must be blind to the target. No hints, no narrowing, no "it's an outdoor one."
- The target must be selected randomly from the pool, after the receiver is already settled.
- Write or draw before you get feedback. Once you have seen the target, your memory of what you perceived is no longer trustworthy.
- Score by blind matching. Give your session notes and a set of four candidate images to someone who does not know the answer, and ask them to rank which image best matches. Self-scoring inflates results enormously.
- Log the misses. A notebook containing only the hits proves nothing at all.
Exercise 1: The Sender-Receiver Drawing Test
This is the classic telepathy design, the same basic structure used in the SRI drawing experiments.
Setup. Two people in separate rooms. The sender has a sealed envelope containing one image, drawn at random from the pool. Agree on a start time and a duration of 15 minutes.
Sender. Open the envelope. Look at the image steadily. Do not try to "push" it or visualize beams of energy. Instead, hold your attention on the concrete qualities of the image: its shape, its main colors, whether it is tall or wide, whether it is warm or cold, what it would feel like to touch. Return to those qualities whenever your mind drifts.
Receiver. Sit with eyes closed and a pen in hand. Do not try to guess the object. Record fragments as they arrive: shapes, colors, textures, temperatures, moods, single words. Draw more than you write. If you catch yourself reasoning, note the reasoning separately and go back to raw impressions.
Afterward. Compare, then score blind with four candidates as described above.
Exercise 2: The Ganzfeld Procedure
Ganzfeld means "whole field" in German. The method creates mild, uniform sensory input on the theory that a faint signal is easier to notice when the noise is constant. It was refined by Charles Honorton and became the most heavily analyzed protocol in parapsychology.
Setup for the receiver:
- Halve a ping-pong ball and tape one half over each closed eye
- Aim a soft red light at the face, producing an even pink field with no shapes in it
- Play white noise or steady static through headphones
- Recline comfortably; you are aiming for relaxed and awake, not asleep
Run: After a settling period of about 15 minutes, speak aloud continuously for 20 to 30 minutes, describing every image, word, and sensation that arrives. Record it. Meanwhile the sender, in another room, views the randomly selected target.
Judging: Afterward the receiver is shown four images and ranks them against their own transcript. By chance alone the target lands in first place 25% of the time, which gives you a clean baseline to measure against over many sessions.
Exercise 3: Coordinate Remote Viewing Structure
CRV was Ingo Swann's attempt to make the process teachable and auditable. The full system is elaborate; this is the usable core.
Tasking. A third person assigns the target a random reference number, for example 4471-9082, and seals the target description away. You receive only the number. This is the "coordinate."
Stage 1: The ideogram. Write the number, then let your pen make a spontaneous mark on the page without deciding what to draw. Immediately probe that mark and record its most basic qualities in a few words: hard, soft, natural, structural, wet, airy.
Stage 2: Sensories. Record raw sensory data only: colors, textures, temperatures, sounds, smells. Single words in a column. No nouns yet.
Stage 3: Dimensionals. Sketch shape and scale. Tall, wide, enclosed, open, a horizontal surface with a vertical mass rising from it.
Stage 4: Naming and impressions. Only now allow concepts, and label each one honestly as either data or as an inference you constructed.
The AOL rule. CRV calls a premature conclusion Analytical Overlay. When your mind announces "it's the Eiffel Tower," you write AOL: Eiffel Tower in the margin, then deliberately set it aside and return to Stage 2 sensory data. This is the most valuable habit in the entire method, and it transfers well beyond this subject: naming a thing too early stops you from seeing it.
How to Keep Score Over Time
One session tells you nothing. Chance produces convincing hits regularly, which is exactly why the protocols exist.
Run sessions in blocks of 25. For each, record the date, the target number, whether the blind judge ranked the target first out of four, and a one-line note. At the end of the block, count the first-place ranks. Chance gives you about 6 out of 25. If you are consistently above that across several blocks, you have something worth examining more carefully. If you are at 6, you have learned something true and useful, which is that this block did not work.
What to Realistically Expect
Be clear-eyed about the state of the evidence. Mainstream science does not accept telepathy as demonstrated. The laboratory effects reported in this literature are small, contested, and disputed by qualified critics on grounds of methodology and replication. The 1995 review of the government program concluded the work had never produced information specific enough to act on.
What the practice reliably gives you, regardless of where you land on the phenomenon itself, is unusually good training in a rare skill: separating raw perception from the story your mind immediately builds on top of it. That is the discipline behind the AOL rule, and it is worth having on its own terms.
A Four-Week Starting Plan
- Week 1: Sender-receiver drawing, three sessions. Focus entirely on recording impressions without interpreting them.
- Week 2: Repeat, but add blind judging with four candidate images. Expect your scores to drop. That drop is the point.
- Week 3: Two ganzfeld sessions, 30 minutes each.
- Week 4: Four CRV sessions using the stage structure, marking every AOL.
Try it: Before anything else, run five sender-receiver sessions and score them blind. Establish your honest baseline first. Everything you do afterward is only meaningful against it.
- Use our gematria calculator to compare the numerical values of the three protocols, or to check words that surface during a session.