Dr. Elmer Green is the former Director of the Voluntary Controls project at the Menninger Institute in Topeka, Kansas. He and his wife Alyce are pioneers in the field of biofeedback training, authoring the classic book "Beyond Biofeedback." His most recent project, "The Copper Wall," explores possible electromagnetic coorelates of the human energy field.

DiCarlo: Was there any particular event in your life that served as a trigger, and caused you to look beyond the party line of the traditional scientific paradigm?

Green: No, there was nothing in my life that was like that, and the reason is, I was aware of the essence of this emerging paradigm from the time I was young. There never was a time I wasn't aware that there was a collective unconscious. I knew about this from the time I was about three years old. Since I knew about it, I took it for granted.

When I first started reading Carl Jung, I thought, "Wow, this guy really knows something. He's writing about things that I know about, so I know he's right." I thought that was pretty funny when I found out later who he was, I mean, the creator of the idea of the collective unconscious. When I first read him as a kid, I just thought, "Well, yes he's right. He knows something." I already knew about it from an experiential point of view. But I had never known that anybody had written about it.

So there was no event that I know of in my case, but you are right, for a lot of people, it's sort of like, something happens. Sometimes it might be the death of a friend, or a family member that all of a sudden triggers them into the awareness of a larger reality.

DiCarlo: Over the past several years you have spent your time on a project you have named "The Copper Wall Experiment." I have to admit, that sounds very intriguing. Please explain.

Green: When I was a student in the department of physics at the University of Minnesota, I had read about the use of a copper wall that meditators would sit in front of to induce deeper meditative states in the book called "The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnet. " It occurred to me, if people were meditating in a really potent way, they may very well be generating electrical voltages in their body. Over many years, the idea stuck in my mind, until about ten years ago, when we finally had the chance to test it. So we set up a copper wall which people sit in front of, with their body facing true north. They are isolated from ground by glass blocks. They have a bar magnet over their heads. After doing all this set-up work, we began to measure the voltages that developed on the walls as a way of finding out whether or not their body changed voltage. I didn't want to put wires directly on the body for a number of technical reasons. If you change the voltage of an electrical object in a room, it has an effect on others things too. So I just wired up the wall to see what was happening to the human body.

DiCarlo: How do you know that these voltages being measured were not attributable to normal electrical fluctuations of the body that have been commonly observed?

Green: In the first place, the person is sitting alone in the room, isolated from ground. The normal body voltages that are generated in a situation like that are usually in the milli-volt range, which is very small. Also, you would expect a person's body voltage to drift by as much as two volts from a buildup of static electricity. So you expect some fluctuation.