Behind "The Delphi Bloodline" by Donna Del Oro Part Three of Six

Today we continue a series of six blogs by guest blogger Donna Del Oro, each providing insight into her novel The Delphi Bloodline, just released on June 1, 2012 by Musa Publishing. Please join us through Saturday, June 9th to learn more about this exciting new novel.

Behind THE DELPHI BLOODLINE:

My ESP Workshop

By Donna Del Oro

            Twenty-plus years ago, I became obsessed with exploring the facts and fictions of ESP phenomena. My cousin, a practicing clairvoyant, had inspired me to delve into the whole realm of parapsychology, or study of psychic phenomena. Highly skeptical about the whole business, I nonetheless signed up for a weekend ESP Workshop, given by a Czech physicist who once worked for the Moscow Institute for Psychic Research. The workshop took place in a classroom at a local community college (Foothill College) in my Silicon Valley town of Los Altos Hills.

            There were eleven of us, all total strangers—nine women and two men. The first day, Saturday, the Czech physicist lectured on the history of ESP and the various forms and types of ESP: Clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, precognition, telepathy, psychometry, psychokinesis, remote viewing and channeling. The study of psychic phenomena is called “parapsychology”.  Psi (pronounced “sigh”) is the study of psychic phenomena from a psychological perspective. The Journal of Parapsychology defines psi as “a general term to identify a person’s extrasensory-motor communication with the environment.”  Psi is a letter of the Greek alphabet and the first letter of the Greek word, “psyche”, which literally means “breath” in Greek and refers to the human soul. Basically, having ESP means that you are able to perceive someone’s thoughts, situation, or issues in life without using one of your five ordinary senses.

            The Czech physicist leading our ESP Workshop claimed to be a former skeptic, himself, and a dedicated non-believer who, after working in the experimental testing labs of the Moscow Institute, became a convert. He had seen incontrovertible proof, in his opinion, that ESP existed in gifted intuitives. These intuitives were able to consciously apply knowledge they had accessed and processed in an unconscious, unexplainable manner, and that science could not explain.

            Yet.

            He ended that first day of the workshop with instructions to return on Sunday with a notebook and an inanimate object that had emotional significance to each one of us.  The next day, the same eleven of us brought our own individual objects, which we all carried concealed in plain brown paper bags. Each of us put our paper bag into a cardboard box behind the physicist’s podium. Later, each of us approached the box and withdrew a paper bag that was not our own. After everyone had at his/her desk his chosen bag, he then told us to open the bag, take out the stranger’s object and hold it in our hands.  Then he timed us. For the next fifteen minutes, we were to meditate on the object and write down any visions, words or impressions that came to our minds. We were not to censor anything, no matter how strange, puzzling or nonsensical the vision, word or impression seemed.

            At the end of the timed period, he went from person to person and asked us to identify the owner of the object and to read aloud our visions, words or impressions. We did. What followed was truly astonishing and something I will never forget as long as I live. Nine out of the eleven of us correctly identified the owners of the objects. Eight out of eleven of us had made several—at least three to four--correct associations and revelations about the object, its owner and facts about the owner.

            For example, I correctly identified the owner of the object I held—a macramé type of belt. I’d had visions of a shelf full of potted succulents and cactus plants. A red-brick apartment building, the kind you find in the Eastern U.S.  Those two associations fit. The woman said she had a collection of cacti in pots and that she’d recently moved from Philadelphia, where she’d lived in a red-brick apartment building. There was also a scene of a little boy on a bike, which the woman could not place or relate to in any way. Who knows? Maybe it did later.

            Well, the fact that I’d gotten three out of four correct got my attention. After that experiment, I became a believer. Other experiences followed, too, including two precognitive dreams. Many years later, the idea for THE DELPHI BLOODLINE manifested itself and I ran with it. Researching and writing that novel was one of the most enjoyable and most satisfying experiences of my life.


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