My Library

back from the impossible to my mundane and hopefully more predictable realities. So it didn't matter very much or so I thought. And Monday, 5 June 1972, was the first of the five days I was obliged to spend with him. Only four more days to go, I silently said to myself and then I'll be free again, one way or the other. The real fact of the matter, though, was something neither Puthoff nor I could have imagined. For unknown to both of us WE HAD BUT SOME THIRTY-TWO HOURS TO GO before both of us were plunged into the THREE strangest attributes of the IMPOSSIBLE. You see: (1) the impossible is invisible until it happens; (2) after it has happened, everyone makes very serious efforts to explain how it didn't or couldn't happen which is to say, to reinvisibilize it; and (3) efforts to re-invisibilize something serve to make it MORE visible. And, as I might point out, here in a nutshell is the entire history of psi during the modern scientific period - and which might be further reduced to four words: KEEPING THE IMPOSSIBLE IMPOSSIBLE. Yeah! The event that occurred on 6 June 1972 was to galvanize the pathways that led into the next fifteen years of research at SRI. Even so, had it occurred elsewhere and under the auspices of anyone else except Hal Puthoff, doubtless it promptly would have been re-invisibilized as have all great moments in psychical and parapsychology research. But Dr. H. E. Puthoff was now on the case. And thereby hangs the very slim thread he wove into the mighty rope which came to lasso ALL of this nation's great and not-so-great intelligence agencies. There is a definition of personal power which should now be presented. It is this: personal power is the ability to create a context in which others can play.