Review: Telepsychics by Joseph Murphy: His Strangest and Most Fascinating Book

Every author has a weird book. The one that doesn’t quite fit the catalog, the one that makes fans raise an eyebrow and skeptics reach for ammunition. For Joseph Murphy, that book is Telepsychics.

The full title is Telepsychics: Tapping Your Hidden Subconscious Powers, and it was published in 1969, during a period when mainstream culture was becoming newly fascinated with psychic phenomena, ESP research, and the far boundaries of human consciousness. Murphy, ever responsive to his audience, dove into these topics with the same confident enthusiasm he brought to prosperity and health. The result is a book that’s simultaneously his most audacious and his most problematic, and also, against all odds, genuinely fascinating in places.

What “Telepsychics” Means

Murphy coins this term to describe the subconscious mind’s ability to access information and influence events beyond the range of the physical senses. He’s talking about intuition, precognition, telepathy, remote influence, and what he calls “supranormal” healing, essentially, psychic phenomena framed through his familiar subconscious-mind theology.

His argument is that these phenomena aren’t supernatural at all. They’re natural extensions of the subconscious mind’s capabilities, which he considers far vaster than conventional psychology acknowledges. Prayer, intuition, psychic impressions, and synchronicity are all manifestations of the same underlying process: the subconscious mind connecting with what Murphy calls “Infinite Intelligence” and retrieving information or catalyzing events that the conscious mind couldn’t achieve alone.

“Your subconscious mind is connected with Infinite Intelligence. It knows the answer to all problems. It never sleeps. It is constantly at work, even when you are asleep. Trust it, nourish it with right thoughts, and it will speak to you in ways that you cannot now foresee.”

– Joseph Murphy, Chapter 2

The Case Studies That Make You Lean Forward

Murphy fills this book with stories that range from plausible to eyebrow-raising. A businessman who received a strong intuitive flash not to board a plane, and the plane crashed. A woman who “felt” her distant mother was in danger and called just in time. A man who mentally rehearsed a negotiation and found the other party seemingly compelled to agree to his terms.

The most interesting stories involve what Murphy calls “absent healing”, cases where someone directed subconscious healing intention toward another person without that person’s knowledge, and the person recovered. Murphy describes specific protocols: visualizing the person whole and healthy, affirming their perfect health, and holding the imagined state with strong feeling. He claims remarkable success rates.

Now, I want to be careful here. These stories are unverified, anecdotal, and filtered through Murphy’s theological framework. They prove nothing in a scientific sense. But some of them align intriguingly with phenomena that parapsychology researchers, including those at institutions like the Rhine Research Center and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab, have studied with results that, while controversial, are statistically anomalous.

The honest position is: something might be going on here that we don’t fully understand, and Murphy was working at the boundary where spirituality, psychology, and unexplained phenomena blur together. Whether his explanations are correct is a separate question from whether the phenomena he describes are real.

The Chapter I Didn’t Expect to Take Seriously

Chapter 7, on dreams and precognition, initially read like wishful thinking. Murphy argues that the subconscious mind, during sleep, can access information about future events and communicate it through dream symbolism. Standard psychic fare, right?

Except Murphy then offers a practical protocol for what he calls “dream incubation”, deliberately asking the subconscious, before sleep, to provide guidance on a specific problem, and then paying attention to dreams for the answer. He’s specific about the process: formulate the question clearly, write it down, read it before sleep, fall asleep with the expectation of receiving an answer, and write down whatever you remember upon waking.

I tried this. Not because I believed in psychic dreaming, but because I was stuck on a problem and figured I had nothing to lose. The first night, nothing notable. The second night, I dreamed about a conversation with someone I hadn’t thought about in years, and the conversation contained a perspective on my problem that I genuinely hadn’t considered. Was this “the subconscious accessing higher intelligence,” as Murphy claims? Or was it my sleeping brain simply making connections my waking brain was too busy to see? I lean toward the latter explanation, but I’ll admit: Murphy’s protocol produced a useful result regardless of the mechanism.

“The feeling of health produces health. The feeling of wealth produces wealth. Do not question how it works, simply give the subconscious your order by feeling the reality of what you desire, and it will find a way to bring it to pass.”

– Joseph Murphy, Chapter 5

Where It Goes Off the Rails

Let me be blunt: parts of this book are irresponsible.

Murphy’s chapter on healing suggests that subconscious reprogramming can address serious medical conditions, including cancer. He doesn’t recommend against medical treatment, but he doesn’t recommend it either. The implication (that right thinking can cure any disease) is dangerous, and I can’t endorse it. Modern evidence-based medicine saves lives. Mental attitude may play a supporting role in healing, but Murphy’s framing goes well beyond what evidence supports.

The chapter on influencing others raises ethical concerns Murphy doesn’t address. He describes techniques for mentally influencing another person’s behavior, getting a boss to give you a raise, getting a romantic interest to reciprocate, getting a rival to cooperate. He frames this as “aligning with Divine mind” rather than manipulation, but the distinction is thin. When you’re deliberately using mental techniques to influence someone’s decisions without their awareness, the word for that is manipulation, regardless of the spiritual packaging.

And several of Murphy’s claims are simply unverifiable. He presents stories as fact that could easily be coincidence, selective memory, or fabrication. Without independent verification, the reader has no way to assess credibility. Murphy asks for trust, and while his sincerity seems genuine, trust isn’t evidence.

A Practice Inspired by This Book

The dream incubation technique is the most useful and least problematic practice in this book. Here’s a clean version:

Choose a genuine problem or question you’re struggling with, something where you feel stuck and need a new perspective. Before bed, write the question on a piece of paper in clear, simple language. Read it aloud. Then, as you lie down, say mentally: “My deeper mind has the solution to this. I trust it to reveal the answer in a form I can understand.”

Fall asleep with an attitude of calm expectation, like waiting for a letter you know is on its way. When you wake, before reaching for your phone, lie still for a moment and notice what’s in your mind. Write down any dreams, fragments, feelings, or ideas: even if they seem unrelated to the question.

Do this for five consecutive nights. Review your notes at the end. In my experience and in research on incubation effects in creativity, the subconscious often delivers answers that arrive sideways: through metaphor, unexpected association, or a shift in how you feel about the problem rather than a direct solution.

Should You Read This?

Telepsychics is Murphy at his most adventurous and his most reckless. The adventurousness makes it genuinely interesting, he’s exploring questions that mainstream spiritual books won’t touch. The recklessness makes it occasionally dangerous, he’s making claims without evidence and offering practices without adequate caution.

Read it if you’re already well-grounded in Murphy’s core work and want to see where he takes the ideas at their most extreme. Read it if you’re interested in the intersection of subconscious psychology and psychic phenomena. Read it if you can hold speculative claims lightly and extract practical value without swallowing the framework whole.

Don’t read it as your first Murphy book. Don’t take the healing claims at face value. And don’t use the influence techniques on other people without seriously examining the ethics of doing so.

It’s his strangest book, and that’s exactly what makes it worth reading, carefully, critically, and with your own judgment firmly engaged.