EHE Book Reviews

Psi Training and Development Record Type: Review ID: 1250
Enigma: Psychology, the Paranormal and Self-Transformation Donahoe, James J.
Psychologist Donahoe is a first-person explorer of altered states and psi. He makes important observations concerning the paradigms guiding parapsychological and psychological research. He proposes that parapsychology should be based on breaking limits rather than setting new ones, and he emphasizes the imagination as the optimal approach to psi. Outer reality (i.e., empirical results) is dependent on inner conception. The same holds for psychology as the science of consciousness. Instead of mimicking the physical sciences, psychology must first take an independent stand by examining imaginative faculties and conscious intent. He proposes that the findings of parapsychology and altered states research indicate "that the world is much more fluid than the conservators of the old paradigm would acknowledge" (p. 112). The reality with which parapsychologists must deal, whether in investigating the paranormal before or after death, cannot be determined. "How we arrange existences gets determined by experiment, as always, a combination of discovery and invention in which the new scientist and new artist are simultaneously the investigators, the experimental subjects and the experiments themselves" (p. 113).
Publisher Information:	Oakland, CA: Bench Press, 1979. 199p. Annotated-classified bibliography: 171-193; Glossary: 167-170; Index: 195-199

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Enigma: Psychology, the Paranormal and Self-Transformation