Preface
When I was sixteen years old, I found a little book in the basement of our house in Redding, Connecticut, about self-hypnosis, called Scientific Autosuggestion for Personality Adjustment and Development. 1 According to this book, hypnosis is based on the principle that when a suggestion or idea enters the mind unconsciously or consciously under favorable conditions of susceptibility or suggestibility, the person given the suggestion will carry it out automatically, as if by compulsion, as long as the suggestion does not run contrary to that person’s ethical code or deep-rooted convictions. Selfhypnosis or autosuggestion occurs when someone creates a favorable condition in their own mind and plants a suggestion. Johns, the author of Scientific Autosuggestion , begins by emphasizing the power of imagination over the body (a power that tantric practitioners have exploited for centuries). According to the principles of suggestion, the body reacts to whatever the unconscious mind imagines or truly believes, regardless of what the conscious person may will. For instance, just about anyone could walk across a foot-w ide beam placed on the ground, but place that beam a thousand feet in the air, and it is a different story altogether. Why? Most people couldn’t walk across a beam that high up because they imagine themselves falling. First comes the image, then the body begins to tremble and shake with fear. Tightrope walkers and high-rise construction workers overcome this imaginative scenario through experience and therefore don’t fear falling in the same way.
After reading Scientific Autosuggestion , I decided to conduct some of the experiments in the book with my best friend, Bob. The first was simply to place a small but heavy object on the end of a string at least eight inches long, hold it out in front of you at arm’s length with your eyes closed and imagine that it is swinging back and forth. To test this, I tied some string to a pocket watch and gave it a go. After about fifteen seconds of imagining, I opened my eyes and sure enough—t here was the watch swaying back and forth as if by its own power. The muscles in my hand had responded to my mental image without my conscious effort to move the watch. Next, Bob tried it and got the same result. We had found the key to a strange new reality. After this initial experiment, Bob and I took turns hypnotizing each other until we could make the other think their hands were stuck together or to the surface of a table. Although these little experiments were exciting, they were only warm-up exercises for my lifelong journey into different dimensions of consciousness.
One Sunday night after conducting our experiments for hours, after Bob left, I stayed awake late into the night sitting completely still and staring at various objects around my room. By the time I finally fell asleep, I had entered the deepest level of trance I had yet reached. The next morning when I awoke, I felt incredibly relaxed and stress free, as if a giant weight had been lifted off me. Also, everything looked different to me, as if I were in a dream. Objects appeared brighter and their edges more distinct, yet at the same time they appeared less real. Just as in a lucid dream, the objects around me seemed to lack substantiality outside of my own consciousness. This strange feeling of relaxation and heightened awareness lasted three days.
After two days of this altered state, I began to worry that I would never return to my “ordinary” state of consciousness. You might wonder why I would want to leave this new state, since it was so relaxing. I can only conclude that as prisoners of our own minds, we grow accustomed to our prison cells and find it frightening to leave. Moreover, I had no teacher or guide to lead me through this strange new psychic terrain. The magical wonderland I had entered was so different from the experience of the people around me that I began to feel alienated. The students and teachers around me at school appeared to me as if hypnotized in some kind of collective trance. So enchanted as they were by their own thoughts and concerns, they did not notice the wondrousness of the things around them. I wondered why they couldn’t perceive the illusory nature of everything they took to be so real.
Once I “came down” from my experience, I have to admit that I was somewhat relieved to be back in the “ordinary world,” although I remained extremely curious about the world beyond the mundane, and having been to that place, I held on to the memory.
Following this experience, again one evening late at night, I decided to conduct an autohypnosis experiment. I had heard stories of people who were able to relive childhood and past-l ife experiences through hypnosis. Fascinated by these stories, I decided to conduct one of these “regression” experiments on myself. To do this, I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, breathing calmly and deeply. Then I began to recall the past year of my life, moving backward in time as if playing a videotape in reverse. Scenes of the past year passed before my mind’s eye as I relived some of the emotions and thoughts attached to these mental images. Once I reviewed the past year, the sixteenth of my life, I went back to my fifteenth year repeating to myself, “I am fifteen, I am fifteen, I am fifteen,” until scenes from the year would come to me. Of course, there were gaps in my memory—I couldn’t remember everything that had happened to me when I was fifteen, only the most significant things, although trivial memories would also spring to my mind for no discernable reason.
I continued this process of moving backward in time, one year at a time, for several hours. Each time I felt that I could probe no further for a year, I would go back another one. Although part of my mind knew that I was really sixteen and lying in my bed, another part of my mind was reliving my life as the age I was remembering. Each year I went back, there were more and more gray or completely blank areas with no memories at all. Nevertheless, I kept going back to find out what would happen, thinking, “I am six,” then five, four, three, and two. When I got to one year old, my hands and feet started moving about like I was a baby in my crib. While this was happening, part of mind still knew I was sixteen years old, lying in my bed, but another part of me felt exactly like a baby. I was reliving some type of muscle memory. Suddenly, a little blue ducky toy popped into my head. BAM! It was just there—a purely visual image that lasted only a fraction of a second and was gone. The image was so vivid that it shocked me out of my trance. It had been several hours since I had started the regression, and it was about midnight. I had to work the next day, so I went to bed resolved to ask my mother about it. The next morning, I left early to work at the local grocery store. When I got home in the afternoon, I asked my mom if I’d ever
had a little blue duck toy as a child. She considered it for a while and then said, “Come to think of it, you had a little blue rubber ducky bath toy you used to play with in the tub when you were about one year old.” There were no pictures of this toy, and it had never been mentioned before this conversation.
After my experiments in hypnosis, I went on to learn transcendental meditation (TM) and began studying Buddhism, Zen meditation, and Isshinryu karate under Professor Ed Brown. An ex-Ma rine, Prof. Brown was a seventh- degree black belt with several world records in brick breaking. At a tournament in 1986, I watched him break sixteen chimney bricks (no spacers) with a single ox-jaw strike and set a world’s record. The story I heard at the time was that physicists had constructed a brick-breaking machine that broke after eight bricks and that according to the current (scientific) knowledge of human physiology, it would be impossible for a human to accomplish such a task. This was my first experience of witnessing the “impossible” being made possible. And it left a definite impression.
The following year, I began my studies at Grinnell College in Iowa and enrolled in a course called Introduction to Psychology. During our first lecture on cognitive psychology, the professor asked if anyone in the lecture hall of about two hundred students had any childhood memories from younger than the age of three years old. Since the professor followed schema theory, which maintains memories cannot form until a schema, or mental map, develops with which to interpret them, and this was not believed to take place before the age of three, the professor was expecting no one to raise their hand. I did and then explained to him in front of the other two hundred students my experience of recalling my blue duck through autohypnosis. My story was met with deafening silence (cue the sound of crickets), the kind of polite silence that happens in an academic arena, which speaks louder than a medieval crowd shouting, “Heretic! Burn him!” Following this silent dismissal, the professor simply continued with the lecture on schema formation and conveniently ignored this piece of anomalous data.
A few weeks after this experience, I was reading Edward Conze’s Buddhist Scriptures (1959) for my “Eastern Religions” course when I came across this passage:
A monk who is still a beginner, and who wants to learn to remember his previous lives, should in the afternoon, after he has finished his meal, go to a solitary
and secluded spot, and enter successively into the four trances. He should then emerge from the fourth trance, which is the basis of the Superknowledges, and think of the last thing he did before his meditation, which was the act of sitting down. After that, in reverse order, think of everything he did during the day and night, i.e., how he spread the seat on which he sat down, how he entered his lodging, got ready his robe and alms bowl, the time when he ate, when he came back from the village. . . . In this way these things should be clear to him as if lit up by a lamp. He should furthermore think back in reverse order on what he did two days ago, three, four, and five days ago, ten days ago, half a month ago, one month ago, up to a year ago. In this manner he goes on for ten years, twenty years, and so on, until he comes to the time of his birth in this becoming, and then he should also direct his mind on the mental and physical processes which took place at the moment of his decease in his immediately preceding existence. 2
This was the exact same regression technique I had used when I saw my blue duck!
I learned some valuable lessons from these early college experiences. First, I learned to think twice about publicly questioning the conventional (scientific) dogma or favorite theory of my academic betters based on my own experience. Second, I learned that there are things that scientists don’t understand that the ancient Buddhist masters likely did. For my cognitive psychology professor, my experience of the blue duck could not be veridical because people simply do not have purely visual memories free of a cognitive schematic context. This is the exact same response of those skeptics who dismiss the paranormal as impossible because they believe that a priori such things cannot happen, therefore they do not happen. Thus, for the skeptic, any evidence of the paranormal must be explained away rather than explained. The blue duck incident was my first experience of “scientism,” the dogmatic adherence to science, as opposed to true (empirically based) unbiased scientific inquiry.
While in college, my interest in Asian philosophies and meditation quickly evolved into a passion for Buddhism. I went on to major in religious studies at Grinnell, focusing on Buddhism and practicing Zen. After a Fulbright year in Sri Lanka studying Buddhism and practicing vipassana, I went on to do a master’s degree in theological studies at Harvard Divinity School (1995), a master’s degree in Asian languages and literature at the University of Washington (1999), and a PhD in the study of religions at the School of Oriental
and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (2004). During these years, I continued to practice Buddhism, explore altered states of consciousness, and along the way occasionally encounter the liminal world of the paranormal (see my autobiographical postscript for details). After a year as a teaching fellow at SOAS, I began full-time employment as a lecturer at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, where I work to this day.
In 2016, my interest in Buddhism, altered states, and psychedelic spirituality culminated in the publication of my book Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America. During my research for this book, I was particularly struck by the number of people I met who described paranormal experiences they had undergone in the context of Buddhist practices entirely unrelated to psychedelic use. In one of these stories, the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī appeared to a woman during a high fever; in another, the Buddhist goddess Tārā appeared to a man practicing tantric sadhana and accurately foretold major life events of the man’s future; and in a third, a woman related how she’d had a full-blown spontaneous vision of the Buddha Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche), the legendary founder of the Tibetan Nyingma School, who imparted special teachings to her. 3 These people are successful academics and businesspeople, and their stories seemed to be sincere accounts describing profound and life- changing events in their lives. These stories and others like them, along with my own personal experiences, convinced me that there exists only the thinnest of veils between our “ordinary world” and much more mysterious realities.
Then in 2018, I read the book Mind Beyond Brain: Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal, about the research conducted by the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), founded by Ian Stevenson in 1967.4 Since the 1960s, DOPS has scientifically studied paranormal phenomena such as near- death experiences, past-l ife memories, apparitions, and psychic activity. Mind Beyond Brain evolved out of a daylong symposium in 2010 at Serenity Ridge Retreat Center of the Ligmincha Institute in Virginia, sponsored by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a Tibetan Bön master. Tenzin Wangyal, who moved to the United States in 1991 and founded Ligmincha in 1992, was inspired to organize this event after having learned about the unique research being conducted by DOPS. I found Mind Beyond Brain fascinating and was excited to learn about the current state of the art of scientific research into paranormal phenomena. However, as a Buddhist studies scholar, I was disappointed by the lack of Buddhism in the book. Missing from it were a
nuanced understanding of traditional Buddhist views of the paranormal and contemporary accounts of modern Buddhists and their experiences and understandings of the paranormal. Nevertheless, the book is a valuable contribution to the field for its overview of the scientific study of the paranormal and its challenge to physicalism’s reduction of the mind to the brain. Moreover, it inspired me to write the current book before you, which attempts to bridge the gap between the current science of the paranormal and a more nuanced understanding of Buddhist views concerning the paranormal grounded in history, philology, and contemporary fieldwork. Thus, this book is not a scientific study but falls squarely within the realm of the humanities. The central research question driving this study is: What do contemporary Buddhists have to say about their experiences of the paranormal, and how do these narratives relate to canonical Buddhist accounts and modern scientific understandings? My hope is that this book advances the ongoing dialogue between Buddhism and science concerning the paranormal so that we may gain a deeper understanding of these profoundly transformative anomalous phenomena.
A NUMBER OF CONVERTS to Buddhism report paranormal experiences. Their accounts describe psychic abilities like clairvoyance and precognition, out-of-body experiences, neardeath experiences, and encounters with other beings such as ghosts and deities, and they often interpret these events through a specifically Buddhist lens. This book is a groundbreaking exploration of these phenomena and their implications for both humanistic and scientific study of the paranormal.
D. E. Osto examines accounts of paranormal phenomena experienced by convert Buddhists from around the world collected through an online survey and interviews, placing them in the context of Indian Buddhist sources and recent scientific research. Ultimately, Paranormal States contends, these deeply mysterious and extraordinary experiences exceed current understandings—and they can help bridge the gap between religious and scientific worldviews.
“Osto writes not to ‘prove’ the existence of this or that anomalous phenomenon but to show us that these things happen and that they are often definitive in the lives of Buddhist converts. Paranormal States, like its subject and subjects, is a gift.”
JACQUELINE NASSY BROWN, AUTHOR OF DROPPING ANCHOR, SETTING SAIL: GEOGRAPHIES OF RACE IN BLACK LIVERPOOL
“The brilliance of this book lies in valuing Buddhist experience, whether or not it fits into external schemas. This centers actual Buddhists and their lives. I prize this over anything else in Buddhist studies.”
FRANZ METCALF, AUTHOR OF WHAT WOULD BUDDHA DO?
101 ANSWERS TO LIFE’S DAILY DILEMMAS
“This book makes an important contribution to what has been largely excluded territory in the evolving engagement between religious and spiritual traditions and an expanded contemporary science of mind.”
DAVID E. PRESTI, AUTHOR OF FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS IN NEUROSCIENCE: A BRAIN-MIND ODYSSEY
D. E. OSTO is senior lecturer in philosophy at Massey University. They are the author of Altered States: Buddhism and Psychedelic Spirituality in America (Columbia, 2016) and An Indian Tantric Tradition and Its Modern Global Revival: Contemporary Nondual Śaivism (2020), among other books .