Roger Luckhurst at Aeon Magazine:
This linking of American paranormal research to the worlds of science fiction and UFOlogy suggests that we need to see telepathy in the context of the wider culture, where its meanings were always unstable and unbounded by any scientific protocols. For instance, telepathy resurfaced in the hippy counterculture of the 1960s, among a group that often opposed the oppressive military-industrial machine. Stuart Holroyd’s Psi and the Consciousness Explosion, published in 1977, placed parapsychology as part of a ‘new gnosis’ for the New Age, in which, Holroyd argued, ‘faculties that have been fettered and inhibited by the rigid orthodoxies of the bourgeois life-style and the materialistic values that sustain it will freely flourish.’ As emergent signs of this flourishing, he listed examples of an openness to mystical experience, telepathic communication, psychic healing and the fusion of mind and matter exemplified by biofeedfack research. In the same argument, Holroyd directly linked the counterculture to ‘its allied experimental science, parapsychology’. New Age gurus in the 1960s and ’70s often spoke in the language of the sublime: in their lexicon, telepathy was an instance of expanded consciousness.
more here.