Exploring Psychomanteum as a Psi-Conducive State of Consciousness

The mirror gazing procedure termed the “psychomanteum” was developed by the world renowned psychiatrist Dr. Raymond Moody. It was designed to facilitate reunion experiences with deceased individuals, as a means of addressing the feelings surrounding bereavement. Although the modern psychomanteum is not normally employed to seek extra-sensory perception (ESP) information about the future, it may be that the psychomanteum is psi-conductive. For example, there are many similarities and differences between psychomanteum experiences and accounts of hypnagogic/hypnopompic imagery, which is conducive to ESP. The aim is of this paper was to explore whether the psychomanteum technique encourages a psi-conducive state of consciousness, which would result in scoring that is significantly above mean chance expectation (MCE). One hundred and thirty participants (92 females and 38 males; Mean age= 47.44) were recruited by announcements in newspapers and our web site. Under psychomanteum condition, psi-hitting was obtained (30.8% above MCE); however, under no-psychomanteum (“control”) condition, 29.2% was obtained (where 25% was expected). The results differ slightly from MCE in the psychomanteum condition (p= .02, one-tailed) in comparison with no-psychomanteum condition, but no significant differences were found. A number of positive correlations were also found, for instance, participants who attained higher scores on auditory and visual hallucinations tended to demonstrate psi-hitting.