GENERAL AIM OF THE EHE NETWORK

The EHE Network is an educational and research organization composed of a governing board and (nonvoting) members who share a common interest in exceptional human experience and learning more about it. EHEs are spontaneous anomalous experiences of the psychic, mystical, encounter, and death-related type.

The general aim of the Network is to study the full range of EHEs, find or develop ways of understanding and working with them, draw generalizations based on them, and to disseminate this information to members, scholars in other fields, and the general public. The Network gives equal effort and attention to (a) the social/cultural and (b) the individual. The thrust of (a) is to use scholarly methods and theories, and to develop new ones if necessary, to increase the intellectual understanding of EHEs. The thrust of (b) is to work with actual experiencers of all ages and exceptional human experiences of all types to increase individual awareness and understanding of EHEs, especially how to recognize them, discover their meaning, integrate them, and move forward by means of them. A subsidiary aim of b is to promote a dialogical/counseling method of working with experiencers to uncover the personal and social meanings of their experiences and ways of constructively incorporating them in their lives. In line with this goal, in 1995 the Network opened an EHE Network Counseling Center, directed by Joyce Leo, to provide fee-based counseling and to serve as a local referral center.

The Network wishes to encourage and practice a special attitude toward exceptional human experience in all its activities. Each type of EHE provides a different perception of reality than what Euro-Americans generally experience as reality. The experiences in themselves for the most part alter the experiencer's perception in some way, and implicit in this perception is a whole new conception of who we are and what humans can do and be. In other words, a new worldview is implicit in exceptional human experience. Our aim is to privilege that worldview over thinking about exceptional experience and over pure rational formulations of a worldview. Instead of letting rational thoughts about EHEs serve as the foundation of our conception of them, we suggest that EHEs themselves be used to inform and influence how we conceptualize them. Here we follow William James, who considered subjective data as empirical as any physical fact. This is emphasized in the journal Exceptional Human Experience, where precedence is given to articles on conceptions of exceptional human experience that are outgrowths of EHEs themselves. This approach is described in more detail in "Guidelines for Contributors to Exceptional Human Experience," which is available upon request. This emphasis also is reflected in the membership qualification of having prospective members submit an experience, preferably their own, and describe how it influenced them (or not). Because of this emphasis on personal experience, we do not have an institutional membership category, although down the line we may develop a consortium or network of organizations involved with EHEs.

SPECIFIC ACTIVITIES OF THE EHE NETWORK

1. Advance understanding of the generic concept of exceptional human experience.
2. Differentiate as many types of EHES as possible.
3. Serve as a clearinghouse of information about exceptional human experiences and ways of studying and conceptualizing them.
4. Educate scholars, the general public, special interest groups, and individual EHErs about EHEs.
5. Collect and solicit accounts of EHEs through talks, published appeals, contests, and through the Network's membership.
6. Search the literature of the social sciences, humanities, and sciences for accounts of EHEs, ways of studying them, inducing them, and explaining them, and especially, ways in which they explain things.
7. Publish a semi-annual journal entitled Exceptional Human Experience consisting of case reports, articles EHEs, and methodological and theoretical articles, EHE autobiographies, and profiles of organizations contribute to the knowledge of EHEs, and brief abstracts of a minimum of 300 books, chapters, dissertations, and essays relevant to the subject of EHEs, are also included.
8. Maintain an EHE bibliographic database minimally consisting of all the abstracts/reviews published in EHE.
9. Produce and maintain EHENET, an experiential database of accounts of the full range of types of exceptional human experience, published and unpublished.
10. Give workshops on exceptional human experience.
11. Give lectures on exceptional human experience.
12. Give workshops on writing EHE autobiographies and on working with EHEs.
13. Organize EHE support groups.
14. Provide guidelines for organizing EHE support groups, writing EHE autobiographies, preparing EHE case reports, conducting workshops on EHEs, and writing EHE autobiographies.
15. Provide examples of specific types of EHEs to researchers, writers, students, and the general public.
16. Cooperate with other organizations in collecting and recording and disseminating information about EHEs.
17. Provide bibliographies of sources of information on specific types of EHEs.
18. Publish a newsletter (EHE News) twice a year containing news of the activities of the Network and other organizations and researchers involved with specific types of exceptional human experience; letters from members and others; brief lists of new books and articles of note on EHEs; and book reviews. The newsletter will also publish experiences, but only with the experiencer's consent. (Experiencers may choose anonymity.)
19. Maintain the EHE Network Counseling Center to provide fee-based counseling for people who have had EHEs and a referral service to other counselors in the Long Island-Metropolitan New York area.

MEMBERSHIP QUALIFICATIONS

General Membership

1. Demonstrate personal interest in EHEs by submitting a written account of an exceptional human experience one has had. This account must describe the experience in as much detail as possible, including the circumstances leading up to it and any aftereffects associated with it. The account must indicate how the experience changed the experiencer's life. If it had no effect, this should be stated. If one wishes to join the EHE Network but has not had an exceptional human experience, then he or she can obtain a written account from someone one knows who has had an experience. If one does not know of anyone who has had an EHE, one can send a photocopy of a published experience that changed someone's life. The account must show how the experience was life changing. It must include complete publication information: if a book, give author's full name, full title of book, place of publication, publisher's name, and copyright date and the page numbers of the excerpt. If it is a journal article, give author, article title, journal title, volume, issue number, and first and last page numbers of the article. Summaries of the published experience are not acceptable.
2. Fill out questionnaires about exceptional human experiences and express willingness to fill out others.
3. Fill out an application form that includes, in Part I, name, address, phone number, fax number, type of computer if any, e-mail address, if any. Part II asks about what type(s) of EHEs one is interested in, why one is joining, and what one hopes to get from membership in EHE Network. Members are also asked whether they want the information in one or both parts to be kept confidential. The information in Part I will be used to produce a directory of members, which will be compiled after the first year and will be sent free of charge to all those who remain active in the EHE Network.
4. Remit payment of dues of $40 per year.
5. Institutions as such may not join the EHE Network although individual members or staff of institutions may do so on behalf of their institution as long as they meet with the other membership qualifications.

Student Membership:

SUBSCRIPTIONS

Institutions who wish to subscribe to Exceptional Human Experience may do so at the rate of $60 per year plus $4 for postage outside the U.S. Institutions may subscribe to the EHE News for $15 per year, plus $2 outside the U.S., or to both for $70 per year, plus $6 postage outside the U.S. Single copies of the journal are $15 (add $2 if outside the U.S.).

BENEFITS OF MEMBERSHIP

1. The journal, Exceptional Human Experience, twice a year.
2. The newsletter, EHE News, twice a year.
3. If they do not already have a copy of Vol. 11, No. 2 of Exceptional Human Experience, new members will receive a copy of the book Exceptional Human Experience: Background Papers, which is a collection of unpublished and previously published documents on the origin of the term exceptional human experience, methods of studying it, and ways of working with EHEs, including how to write an EHE autobiography. It is identical to EHE 11(2) except for the cover and title page.
4. For each year one is a member a free search of the EHENET database for a specific type of experience, or a specific quality of experience, a specific trigger, or a specific aftereffect. Results can be provided in the form of a printout or on a floppy disk. Although for some years we have been collecting experiences for this database and a portion of them have been entered in a computer, further funds are needed to make the database operational. We will consider it operational when we have 300 experiences actually entered in database format of Filemaker Pro for Windows. We will then notify members and encourage them to request a search.
5. A free search of the PsiLine Database System (see brief description in "The EHE Network and Its Activities."). The Network will conduct one search per year per member. These bibliographic searches can be for a single term (e.g., psi missing, telepathy, multiple personality), or a combination of up to four variables per search (e.g., clairvoyance experiments with children in classroom situations with free-response targets.) Note—the two to four subjects must involve only one pass through the database. The PsiLine Database System is composed of several databases and the number of databases to be searched for a given question will be determined by the searcher. The member must specify whether they want to receive the search results in the form of a printout or floppy disk. The disk we send will be IBM compatible unless the requestor specifies Macintosh. The disk size desired must be specified. We will send 360k disks free of charge but must charge $1.00 for either 1.2 or 3.5 disks.
6. Members will receive an additional search of each type of database for every new member they recruit. The new member must give the name of the member who recruited them when they apply for membership.
7. If members have no immediate need for or interest in a search of the PsiLine Database System, they need not use this benefit during the calendar year of their membership. Search benefits can be accumulated. However, they can only be used while they are an active member. Members may accrue one search of EHENET per year of membership, starting with 1994. They may continue to accrue a search per year, if they have no immediate need for one and/or until the database is operational.

email EHE Website at: webmedia@ehe.org

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