When the engagement is conscious and within the sensory boundaries, this is what we know as ordinary experience and action. This engagement is both conscious and unconscious, and involves aspects of reality both within our sensory boundaries, and outside of those boundaries. Our minds are always actively engaged with things, even when we are asleep or feel like we are doing nothing.

This engagement has an active, expressive side, and a receptive, becoming-aware-of side. That is, every person is always actively engaged at an unconscious level, with an indeterminately huge amount of reality. Here’s a big part of the gist of first sight theory. The first two sections develop a model of the mind and a new theory of psi – what it is and how it works and what it is for in everyday life. While there have been other psychological models of ESP proposed before, Jim’s is the most comprehensive one published and one that is well connected to the research literature of parapsychology as well as mainstream psychology.Ĭan you give us a brief summary of the book?įirst Sight is a fairly big, densely packed book, but I can give a partial summary. This theoretical model has been briefly discussed in articles ( here, here, and here) and in greater detail in the book referred to in this interview: First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012 to order the book go here). In this interview I focus on what is probably his most important contribution to parapsychology, his First Sight Model. Jim has published over the years many important experimental studies of ESP exploring psychological variables.

First Sight by James C. Carpenter