Book Review: Do You See What I See

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Book Review: Do You See What I See

Author: Russell Targ

Date: 2008

Publisher: Hampton Roads

ISBN: 978-1-57174-559-0

Length: 239 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index

Illustrations: black-and-white photos

Quote: “Our principle (sic) source of suffering is our defense of the story of who we think we are—the story of Me.”

Interesting quote for a memoir...by definition a printed copy of “the story of Me.” Russell Targ, currently 87 years old, is an extremely nearsighted (legally “blind”) physicist and a believer in extrasensory perception. His other books have been about ESP and a Buddhist-flavored New Age spirituality. He is still encouraging people who want to experiment with ESP, according to Google, in Chicago. Google didn't mention whether he's still riding his specially adapted motorbike.

So, do his accounts of how psychics were able to draw images similar to real locations convince readers that ESP is real? Only if you want to be convinced. If you are asked to draw a landscape every day, whether you’re thinking about the location of something someone is looking for or about images you’ve seen on television, in the course of a year it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll draw one image similar to the location of something someone is looking for. You could have picked it out of the person’s mind, or you could have produced a coincidental resemblance.

Americans seriously, scientifically debated about the existence of ESP, fourth-dimensional space, and other concepts that interested Targ, in the mid-twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a great deal of rational, non-occult interest in finding out whether we had, or could develop, some limited degree of telepathy, perhaps with one or two close friends. At least two fellow “brainers” and I attempted to communicate through telepathic dreams, while living in different neighborhoods, to save postage and telephone expenses. We had what seemed to be the usual results: one or two stunning successes—often with trivial bits of information, I remember "seeing" the last dress my friend had bought—but usually not even a sense that a message had been transmitted, and massive failures to transmit important bits of information. Our results convinced me that what information got through was more a matter of friends with similar temperaments thinking alike than of telepathy actually being a useful way to transmit messages. Targ’s experience was apparently different...or at least it took place earlier.

What's been learned later in the twentieth century is that when people testing their telepathic skills are physically close to each other, even if they then separate themselves by a mile or two before attempting to transmit a message, most people who have the High Sensory Perceptivity (HSP) trait will get encouraging results. This is due not to ESP but to perception of people’s reactions to what they’re thinking about. Most, if not all, HSPs were told we were psychic if we were alive in the mid-twentieth century...but high sensory perception is a different phenomenon from extra-sensory perception. Targ is a classic case of HSP, which is why I remain skeptical about his ESP.

HSPs consciously, normally perceive things that non-HSPs need some sort of amplifying device to perceive. Individual HSPs have different combinations of “super” senses and, in some cases, impaired senses. For example, people with normal perceptivity don’t feel a difference between one fingertip, and three fingertips held close together, touching most of the skin surface on their backs; HSPs do. People with normal perceptivity see seven stars in the Big Dipper and five of the Pleiades without a telescope; HSPs see eight stars in the Dipper and seven Pleiades. HSPs can usually feel, and sometimes even see, differences in the atmospheric field surrounding a living body where blood circulation and skin temperature are high or low, which is often known (mostly to charlatans) as “the aura.” HSPs probably notice pain at lower levels than other people do, but use our perceptivity to learn to manage pain and treat the conditions that cause it, so The method by which HSPs can diagnose, and occasionally cure, painful or disabling conditions in other people is empirically verifiable and teachable, but taking a class in it is unlikely to help non-HSPs use it, just as taking a class in music is unlikely to cure tone-deafness. None of this is the same as either the hope that psychics might be able to trace fugitives, or the intimacy that allowed Upton Sinclair and his wife to “read” each other’s pheromones and eye movements well enough for each of them to guess what the other was drawing (and hiding) well enough to draw something similar.  

Targ is, beyond all doubt, HSP. The claim that the trait is genetic is supported by its correlation with physical traits. HSPs come in all colors, but within a family HSP siblings are usually taller, thinner-boned, and fairer-skinned than non-HSP siblings. Targ, being Jewish (not even Scandinavian), 6’5”, with partial albinism, was an extreme example of this correlation. Despite a combination of genetic and traumatic eye damage severe enough to be classified as blindness, he seems to get more use out of his damaged eyes at 70 than some people get out of normal eyes at 25. Given that he does have HSP, is it possible that he’s conditioned himself to believe that he has ESP because his normal perceptivity was always acute? It is likely.

In Do You See What I See, Targ describes a few memorable successes of his own and his friends’ ESP experiments...and hints at a dull majority of failures similar to what the rest of us obtained. Does this prove that he and his friends were truly psychic, or does he prove that the unconscious mind guesses, just as the conscious mind does, and anyone who keeps guessing for seventy years is sure to have some great stories to tell? Probably, whichever opinion you inclined toward before you read it, Do You See What I See will confirm.

Meanwhile, it’s about as entertaining as talking to any seventy-year-old with an intact memory is likely to be. Targ knew some interesting people; the one you might have been wondering about was chess champion Bobby Fischer, Targ’s brother-in-law. His life at the time of writing had acquired an inspirational quality, with the suggestion that not only happiness, but some form of erotic love, may have remained available to him after a colostomy. His self-description as “a blind biker” may be somewhat misleading since he was actually a “legally blind,” nearsighted rider of a specially adapted motorbike, but perhaps it’s defensible on the grounds that it establishes Targ as an interesting, likable, practical researcher.  It’s also been known to turn skeptics off his book. This is unfortunate. “Blind biker,” like “heart transplant” and “portable phone,” may once have described impossible dreams but now describe real things.