The Secret Service changed a motorcade route for the first President George Bush based on a psychic's vision that he would be assassinated, according to a new book about the presidential protective agency.
"In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect," by veteran author Ronald Kessler, evidently is stocked with such juicy items, considering the steady drip of leaks about the book over the past few weeks. It's a curious development, considering that the White House protective detail is supposed to see everything but say nothing about its main client, the President of the United States.
But Kessler, a former investigative reporter at The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and author of several "inside" books on U.S. intelligence, has obviously drilled a hole in the Secret Service's wall of silence, which began crumbling in earnest a few years back with former agents telling tales about President John F. Kennedy's mistresses.
Today Kessler passed along the following anecdote about the psychic, the Secret Service and the 1992 reelection campaign of Bush, taken from his new book, scheduled for publication Aug. 4.
(A Secret Service spokesman at first told SpyTalk it was "false," which he later amended to, "It doesn't make sense.")
In Kessler's telling, Bush was scheduled to give a speech on September 17, 1992, at the civic auditorium in Enid, Oklahoma.
"Agent Norm Jarvis was assigned to run intelligence investigations for the visit, and a detective from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation called him," Kessler said by e-mail.
"He said that a woman who was a psychic had told her police contact, whom she worked with on a homicide case in Texas, that she had had a vision that President Bush was going to be assassinated by a sniper."The police contact, a detective, "told Jarvis that this psychic's visions had actually helped police find buried bodies and had provided useful leads in criminal investigations," Kessler said. "Another seasoned law enforcement homicide investigator from Texas also told Jarvis that he needed to pay attention to her."
Kessler continued:
"Jarvis interviewed the woman, who provided more details from her vision. Jarvis asked her to pinpoint where the president's limo was. She said it was at the Air Force base near Enid. He asked if she could take him to it; she agreed.
"As they drove toward the five hangars on the base, the woman gave Jarvis directions."
Kessler quotes Jarvis as saying:
"As we got close to this one hangar, she said to slow down."
The woman said, "Something is in that building right there."
"What do you mean?" Jarvis asked.
"Something important is in that building there."
"Okay, but not the limo?"
"No," the woman said.
Kessler says, "As they drove past another hangar, the woman said it contained the limo. She then identified another hangar as containing something important.
"Jarvis's hunch was that the limo was in the firehouse bordering the runways. As it turned out, he was wrong and the psychic was right.
"Secret Service agents guard the president's limo until he steps into it. Jarvis checked with them and learned that the hangar identified by the psychic as housing the limo did indeed contain two presidential limousines."
"As more details from the psychic turned out to be right, the advance leader decided the psychic could not be ignored. Never mind if anyone thought they were crazy. Better safe than sorry, he and Jarvis thought."
The leader of the Secret Service advance team ordered the motorcade to take an alternate route, avoiding the overpass, Kessler says. Bush was unharmed. Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan said Kessler's story, "doesn't make sense. We don't make practice of changing a motorcade route based on a psychic." But Donovan, who spent five years on the presidential protective detail, conceded that Agent Jarvis could have told the story to Kessler.
"You'll have to ask the agent," he said.
Kessler said he would not make Jarvis, who is retired, available for an interview.
"The Secret Service cooperated on the book, the first time it has cooperated on a book about the agency," he said in an e-mail. One result is Kessler's report that the agency's "management has been cutting corners since the agency's absorption by the Department of Homeland Security, risking the assassination of President Obama, Vice President Biden, and future presidential candidates."
In an interview with Kessler for the book, Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan "denied that the agency has been cutting corners," Kessler said.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Remote Viewer's Group Report from Benton Bogle
We had a relatively small turnout at the Remote Viewer's group last night due to the holiday season, but it turned out to be a good thing since we were able to each share our perspectives and styles of Remote Viewing with each other. Having a group meet and being in the same room together is really turning out to be a great boon to our individual efforts to learn and develop our Remote Viewing.
Normally at meetings we will have some sort of short presentation, do a remote viewing session and then set aside some time to talk with each other about our experiences, but last night's meeting was dedicated soley to talking about our processes and our "theories" on what is going on with RV. As always, the energy in the room was amazing, and the feedback and insights the various viewers had to share, as well as the encouragement, was extremely helpful to all of us. We got into the nitty-gritty of the way we access and handle information, and shared ideas about how to improve our sessions and our attitude toward the experience. Being able to get feedback and suggestions from other people face-to-face really can't be replaced, and I found the evening to be a strong boost to my efforts, and the other folks there said the same thing.
I've been learning and practicing RV for years, have read dozens of books, been to countless workshops and presentation, and done lots and lots of sessions, but getting immediate feedback with new ideas and perspectives, being reminded of useful techniques, having some of my assumptions and habits questioned and examined was unbelievably helpful. Being in a safe and sympathetic environment and learning from the wide-range of experiences of like-minded people makes a huge difference. Can you tell I thought the meeting went well?
If you are interested in Remote Viewing, you will do yourself a favor in the new year by attending our next Remote Viewing group meeting the 2nd Wednesday in January.
Normally at meetings we will have some sort of short presentation, do a remote viewing session and then set aside some time to talk with each other about our experiences, but last night's meeting was dedicated soley to talking about our processes and our "theories" on what is going on with RV. As always, the energy in the room was amazing, and the feedback and insights the various viewers had to share, as well as the encouragement, was extremely helpful to all of us. We got into the nitty-gritty of the way we access and handle information, and shared ideas about how to improve our sessions and our attitude toward the experience. Being able to get feedback and suggestions from other people face-to-face really can't be replaced, and I found the evening to be a strong boost to my efforts, and the other folks there said the same thing.
I've been learning and practicing RV for years, have read dozens of books, been to countless workshops and presentation, and done lots and lots of sessions, but getting immediate feedback with new ideas and perspectives, being reminded of useful techniques, having some of my assumptions and habits questioned and examined was unbelievably helpful. Being in a safe and sympathetic environment and learning from the wide-range of experiences of like-minded people makes a huge difference. Can you tell I thought the meeting went well?
If you are interested in Remote Viewing, you will do yourself a favor in the new year by attending our next Remote Viewing group meeting the 2nd Wednesday in January.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Strange Science
J.B. Rhine investigated ghosts, telepathy, poltergeists, and other unseen parapsychology phenomena from 1927 to 1965 at his Duke laboratory. Stacy Horn, author of Unbelievable, a recent history of his research, spent countless hours in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library combing through more than 700 boxes of archives. She describes the collection as "a survey of everything weird in the U.S. during that period." Oddly enough, the epicenter of all this weirdness was on Duke's campus.
How did Rhine get his start at Duke?
Mind meld: J.B. Rhine tested sentient creatures—including Duke students and domestic animals—for signs of extrasensory perception.
Duke University Archives
Academic researchers were curious to see if the scientific method could be used to find evidence for life after death, and they were open to that possibility that it could. J.B. Rhine was a scientist, and he was willing to give it a try. So Duke's administrators, like President William Preston Few, were willing to let him.
How did Rhine begin trying to prove this?
Basically, Rhine said we know that when we die, the body dies, the body decays, it's over. We need to find something about ourselves that exists independently of the body. Otherwise, when we die, that's it. So if telepathy operates independent of the body, it opens the door to a possibility that there is something within us that can survive death.
What kinds of experiments did he perform while searching for the existence of telepathy?
He started with a test of simple playing cards. He began with children, but then moved on to Duke students. It was basically a simple test: "Can you tell me what playing card I'm holding?" without seeing it. And he found that they could.
He was using a regular deck of playing cards, and he found that people had certain biases—they would guess certain cards more often than others because they were very familiar with a regular deck. So he had a psychologist, Karl Zener, design him a set of cards with completely different symbols. And these are the ESP cards that a lot of people are familiar with, the ones with the wavy lines, a star, a box, a circle, or a cross. Using these cards, he repeated the test with students and found that they were again able to tell him what symbol was on the cards without seeing them.
What other experiments did Rhine and his colleagues conduct?
The ESP cards really were their staple until the end. They refined the experiments over the years—first, they separated the student and the experimenter with a screen. Ultimately, they were in separate rooms, and the tests were done double blind, so that even the person conducting the experiment didn't know what symbols were on the cards.
The other experiments that they're known for are tests in psychokinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind. Again, the test that they used was a very simple one—rolling dice. They would see if the students could influence the roll of the dice. The experimenters would use their hands and throw the dice against the wall, but, later on, they were using machines to roll the dice, so it would be more random and the experimenter could not be accused of influencing the roll.
And they found, again, that the students did seem to have some ability to influence the roll of the dice, but the effect was a lot weaker. It's not like somebody can go to Las Vegas and win a billion dollars with this ability. It was infinitesimally small.
What did Rhine credit these effects to?
Rhine always felt that ESP was something that operated independently from the physical body. He also thought that someday the answer would be found in the study of consciousness and that when we had a better idea of how consciousness worked, or even what it is, it would explain the effects that he found in his experiments.
And Rhine became a household name?
Well, it's interesting. Rhine is often portrayed as a publicity hound, but he really wasn't. In the beginning, he turned down a lot of interviews because he saw himself as a serious scientist and an academic, and he thought this kind of publicity was undignified. And so he would say yes to some but not to anything that he didn't think was serious.
But from the minute they [Rhine and his wife and co-researcher, Louisa] published their first book, Extra-Sensory Perception [in 1934], there was hostility to their experiments from the scientific community. So he started to agree to more interviews than he had originally, mostly just to get the word out that he was in fact doing serious science, and to attract more scientists who might have an open mind—and more subjects—as well.
How did Duke administrators react?
Unfortunately, his two big supporters, William McDougall, the head of the psychology department who lured him to Duke, and Few died not long after the lab opened. So for the rest of his career, he was always on shaky territory. Every time Duke got a new president, they had to make the decision to keep the lab going or not; one by one, they always decided to keep it going. I guess because it brought the university a lot of publicity and, ultimately, a lot of money.
Where did Rhine and his fellow researchers get their research funding?
They got money from Alfred P. Sloan and Chester Carlson, who was the inventor of the Xerox process. The Office of Naval Research gave them money; the Army, at one point, conducted a test with them; the Rockefeller Foundation; and the list goes on. He was very well funded but mostly from the outside. Duke paid his salary and his assistant's salary and gave them space—desks and stuff like that. It was its own independent lab, and Rhine reported directly to the president.
Where is this kind of work done now?
The lab closed in 1965 when Rhine retired. There was a period where Duke was considering keeping the lab going, and administrators were in talks with Rhine about how that would happen and what it would look like. I found the administration's initial idea of what it would look like, and I loved it. It was going to be a much more multidisciplinary operation involving representatives from all the different academic disciplines within Duke: people from the hard sciences, psychology, religion, and philosophy. They were going to put people with different expertise to work on the problem.
But Rhine was afraid that if that happened, parapsychology, and the people with expertise in parapsychology, would just be subsumed by all the others and eventually kind of shoved away. And he was actually right. I found memos between certain administrators who basically said that was what was going to happen. And then they started to talk to other professors who were even more adamant; they were like, "No! No! No! This is our chance to get rid of parapsychology once and for all."
So a couple of years before he retired, Rhine set up the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and when he retired, he moved over there. It exists today, near West Campus, and is now called the Rhine Research Center.
How would you sum up Rhine's work?
Rhine—and I would include his wife, Louisa, who was equally critical to all this research, too—refined the controls and the statistical methods for analyzing their results in a way that nobody had before. I went through all the various objections, the critics over the years who accused them of fraud or making mistakes with the math, and I examined all these claims and found that they had no basis.
You might want to come up with other explanations for these effects, but you can't say they are the result of sloppy controls, fraud, or wishful thinking. Based on these experiments, there does seem to be an unidentified source of information out there. Unfortunately, we don't know how it's transmitted or how it's processed, but these effects nonetheless seem to be real. We also have a lot more to learn about consciousness.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity by Aaron Kirschenfeld.
Read alumni experiences with the Rhine Institute and submit your own.
Read Horn's Unbelievable blog.
How did Rhine get his start at Duke?
Mind meld: J.B. Rhine tested sentient creatures—including Duke students and domestic animals—for signs of extrasensory perception.
Duke University Archives
Academic researchers were curious to see if the scientific method could be used to find evidence for life after death, and they were open to that possibility that it could. J.B. Rhine was a scientist, and he was willing to give it a try. So Duke's administrators, like President William Preston Few, were willing to let him.
How did Rhine begin trying to prove this?
Basically, Rhine said we know that when we die, the body dies, the body decays, it's over. We need to find something about ourselves that exists independently of the body. Otherwise, when we die, that's it. So if telepathy operates independent of the body, it opens the door to a possibility that there is something within us that can survive death.
What kinds of experiments did he perform while searching for the existence of telepathy?
He started with a test of simple playing cards. He began with children, but then moved on to Duke students. It was basically a simple test: "Can you tell me what playing card I'm holding?" without seeing it. And he found that they could.
He was using a regular deck of playing cards, and he found that people had certain biases—they would guess certain cards more often than others because they were very familiar with a regular deck. So he had a psychologist, Karl Zener, design him a set of cards with completely different symbols. And these are the ESP cards that a lot of people are familiar with, the ones with the wavy lines, a star, a box, a circle, or a cross. Using these cards, he repeated the test with students and found that they were again able to tell him what symbol was on the cards without seeing them.
What other experiments did Rhine and his colleagues conduct?
The ESP cards really were their staple until the end. They refined the experiments over the years—first, they separated the student and the experimenter with a screen. Ultimately, they were in separate rooms, and the tests were done double blind, so that even the person conducting the experiment didn't know what symbols were on the cards.
The other experiments that they're known for are tests in psychokinesis, the ability to move objects with your mind. Again, the test that they used was a very simple one—rolling dice. They would see if the students could influence the roll of the dice. The experimenters would use their hands and throw the dice against the wall, but, later on, they were using machines to roll the dice, so it would be more random and the experimenter could not be accused of influencing the roll.
And they found, again, that the students did seem to have some ability to influence the roll of the dice, but the effect was a lot weaker. It's not like somebody can go to Las Vegas and win a billion dollars with this ability. It was infinitesimally small.
What did Rhine credit these effects to?
Rhine always felt that ESP was something that operated independently from the physical body. He also thought that someday the answer would be found in the study of consciousness and that when we had a better idea of how consciousness worked, or even what it is, it would explain the effects that he found in his experiments.
And Rhine became a household name?
Well, it's interesting. Rhine is often portrayed as a publicity hound, but he really wasn't. In the beginning, he turned down a lot of interviews because he saw himself as a serious scientist and an academic, and he thought this kind of publicity was undignified. And so he would say yes to some but not to anything that he didn't think was serious.
But from the minute they [Rhine and his wife and co-researcher, Louisa] published their first book, Extra-Sensory Perception [in 1934], there was hostility to their experiments from the scientific community. So he started to agree to more interviews than he had originally, mostly just to get the word out that he was in fact doing serious science, and to attract more scientists who might have an open mind—and more subjects—as well.
How did Duke administrators react?
Unfortunately, his two big supporters, William McDougall, the head of the psychology department who lured him to Duke, and Few died not long after the lab opened. So for the rest of his career, he was always on shaky territory. Every time Duke got a new president, they had to make the decision to keep the lab going or not; one by one, they always decided to keep it going. I guess because it brought the university a lot of publicity and, ultimately, a lot of money.
Where did Rhine and his fellow researchers get their research funding?
They got money from Alfred P. Sloan and Chester Carlson, who was the inventor of the Xerox process. The Office of Naval Research gave them money; the Army, at one point, conducted a test with them; the Rockefeller Foundation; and the list goes on. He was very well funded but mostly from the outside. Duke paid his salary and his assistant's salary and gave them space—desks and stuff like that. It was its own independent lab, and Rhine reported directly to the president.
Where is this kind of work done now?
The lab closed in 1965 when Rhine retired. There was a period where Duke was considering keeping the lab going, and administrators were in talks with Rhine about how that would happen and what it would look like. I found the administration's initial idea of what it would look like, and I loved it. It was going to be a much more multidisciplinary operation involving representatives from all the different academic disciplines within Duke: people from the hard sciences, psychology, religion, and philosophy. They were going to put people with different expertise to work on the problem.
But Rhine was afraid that if that happened, parapsychology, and the people with expertise in parapsychology, would just be subsumed by all the others and eventually kind of shoved away. And he was actually right. I found memos between certain administrators who basically said that was what was going to happen. And then they started to talk to other professors who were even more adamant; they were like, "No! No! No! This is our chance to get rid of parapsychology once and for all."
So a couple of years before he retired, Rhine set up the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, and when he retired, he moved over there. It exists today, near West Campus, and is now called the Rhine Research Center.
How would you sum up Rhine's work?
Rhine—and I would include his wife, Louisa, who was equally critical to all this research, too—refined the controls and the statistical methods for analyzing their results in a way that nobody had before. I went through all the various objections, the critics over the years who accused them of fraud or making mistakes with the math, and I examined all these claims and found that they had no basis.
You might want to come up with other explanations for these effects, but you can't say they are the result of sloppy controls, fraud, or wishful thinking. Based on these experiments, there does seem to be an unidentified source of information out there. Unfortunately, we don't know how it's transmitted or how it's processed, but these effects nonetheless seem to be real. We also have a lot more to learn about consciousness.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity by Aaron Kirschenfeld.
Read alumni experiences with the Rhine Institute and submit your own.
Read Horn's Unbelievable blog.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
A Viewers Guide to THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS
By Col. John B. Alexander - US Army (Ret) • Nov 9th, 2009 •
The movie, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, is based on a book of the same title. While listed as nonfiction, the facts were extrapolated almost beyond recognition. The people in the book were listed by their real names. I was named many times.
While some Special Forces units experimented with various techniques, the vast majority of the incidents came from one of two other sources. Formal psi research programs were conducted in the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). There was also a unique think tank called Task Force Delta at Headquarters Department of the Army and later at the Army War College. Delta was arguably the most innovative organization in the world. With support of senior leadership, we were consciously pushing the envelope. It should be noted that all of the explorations undertaken were done based on solid rationale.
Facts and Fiction
- The First Earth Battalion (1EB) was created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a brilliant imaginer and artist. He literally owns the First Earth Battalion concept.
- The 1EB was never an authorized military unit of the U.S. Army
- The 1EB was a notional concept that encouraged/allowed people to think innovatively, yet within a military construct
- The New Earth Battalion is a movie version of 1EB
- Most of the movie characters are based on real people – though some are composites
- The Kevin Spacey character seems to be made up for movie purposes
- Senior officer with ponytail (Jeff Bridges) NOT REAL
- Remote Viewing – REAL- and was a 20 year official program
- Use of Remote Viewing in Gen Dozier kidnapping by Red Brigade – REAL
- Concern about Soviet psychic research – REAL
- JEDI projects – REAL – but ad hoc (I had one of them with multi-agencies)
- Spoon bending – REAL – was taught to hundreds
- Cloud busting –REAL – though never as fast as done by Clooney
- Computer crashing – REAL – incident did happen
- Fire walking -REAL
- New Age exploration – REAL
- Running into walls – NOT REAL (is the opening scene of the movie)
- Use of LSD – not only NO, BUT HELL NO
- Hamster staring –ATTEMPTED – by Guy Savelli (a civilian martial artist)
- Goat Lab – REAL – used to train medics
- Goats – Hit by martial artists – It did die hours later
- Goats – Staring – no credible evidence to support this allegation
- Dim mak – PROBABLY REAL – supported by physical evidence
- References to a hollow army –REAL – post Vietnam was a traumatic period
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE
“If everything you’re attempting is successful, you are nowhere close to the edge!”
John Alexander
The movie, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS, is based on a book of the same title. While listed as nonfiction, the facts were extrapolated almost beyond recognition. The people in the book were listed by their real names. I was named many times.
While some Special Forces units experimented with various techniques, the vast majority of the incidents came from one of two other sources. Formal psi research programs were conducted in the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). There was also a unique think tank called Task Force Delta at Headquarters Department of the Army and later at the Army War College. Delta was arguably the most innovative organization in the world. With support of senior leadership, we were consciously pushing the envelope. It should be noted that all of the explorations undertaken were done based on solid rationale.
Facts and Fiction
- The First Earth Battalion (1EB) was created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon, a brilliant imaginer and artist. He literally owns the First Earth Battalion concept.
- The 1EB was never an authorized military unit of the U.S. Army
- The 1EB was a notional concept that encouraged/allowed people to think innovatively, yet within a military construct
- The New Earth Battalion is a movie version of 1EB
- Most of the movie characters are based on real people – though some are composites
- The Kevin Spacey character seems to be made up for movie purposes
- Senior officer with ponytail (Jeff Bridges) NOT REAL
- Remote Viewing – REAL- and was a 20 year official program
- Use of Remote Viewing in Gen Dozier kidnapping by Red Brigade – REAL
- Concern about Soviet psychic research – REAL
- JEDI projects – REAL – but ad hoc (I had one of them with multi-agencies)
- Spoon bending – REAL – was taught to hundreds
- Cloud busting –REAL – though never as fast as done by Clooney
- Computer crashing – REAL – incident did happen
- Fire walking -REAL
- New Age exploration – REAL
- Running into walls – NOT REAL (is the opening scene of the movie)
- Use of LSD – not only NO, BUT HELL NO
- Hamster staring –ATTEMPTED – by Guy Savelli (a civilian martial artist)
- Goat Lab – REAL – used to train medics
- Goats – Hit by martial artists – It did die hours later
- Goats – Staring – no credible evidence to support this allegation
- Dim mak – PROBABLY REAL – supported by physical evidence
- References to a hollow army –REAL – post Vietnam was a traumatic period
PUSHING THE ENVELOPE
“If everything you’re attempting is successful, you are nowhere close to the edge!”
John Alexander
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Battle satire 'Men Who Stare at Goats' has a Maryland link
It's strange but true. Maryland played a role in the events that inspired the military satire 'Men Who Stare at Goats'By Michael Sragow michael.sragow@baltsun.com Baltimore Sun reporter
November 1, 2009
The makers of "The Men Who Stare At Goats" have planted this epigraph before the movie: "More of this is true than you would believe." But I heard one young man emerging from a preview saying, "I don't think any of this is true."
After all, who in their right mind would buy a story about a visionary Army officer embracing Eastern martial arts and West Coast encounter sessions, then recruiting new American fighting men who would "fall in love with everyone," "sense plant auras," "attain the power to pass through objects such as walls," "have out-of-body experiences" and "be able to hear and see other people's thoughts"? And who could accept that this battalion employed psychic powers to locate a hostage halfway around the world - and to stop the heart of a goat?
But that visionary, Bill Django, played by Jeff Bridges, is based on a real man, Jim Channon, who did his military-intelligence training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore County (and lived at the Colony in Towson when he was doing it). In the 1970s and 1980s, he did engage commanding officers and fellow members of the think tank Task Force Delta in his dream of transforming the military into a holistic band of brothers. They rewarded him by reading him official orders to become commander of the First Earth Battalion.
Of course, this battalion (in the film, the New Earth Army) was a mind-expanding network, not a formal fighting group, with no set address except Task Force Delta and maybe Mother Earth. Its members were among the first on the planet to keep in touch through e-mail
And many of the exploits that the filmmakers ascribe to Channon's troops were done just a few miles from Baltimore, at Fort Meade. The site was two crumbling barracks belonging to a Defense Intelligence Agency unit devoted to "remote viewing" - the term for envisioning an unseen target using extra-sensory perception. Dale Graff, a sometime-Marylander who now lives in Hamburg, Pa., directed the program and gave it an enduring name: "Stargate."
Channon's goal was to re-imagine the American soldier as a "warrior monk" - equally deft at war and peace, destruction and healing. Graff aimed to pursue untapped powers of perception while locating Cold War targets or drug smugglers through Stargate members' super-intuitions.
Both men have healthy appetites for humor and similar mixed feelings for the movie. On the phone from Hawaii, Channon says it's only "one-third accurate." But he salutes the moviemakers because "it's really hard in the modern world of the trivia hairball to get anything important out to the public ... and they have made it so the paranormal doesn't seem like witchcraft."
As a man with a talent for seeing a few days into the future, Graff, a subtle joker, wrote these words before he saw the movie: "I laughed at the ridiculous antics of the characters. ... [But] while we laugh, are we not also acknowledging something hidden within ourselves that can be uncovered?" Afterward, he considered his pre-review pretty accurate.
The film's surefire, black-comic attention-getter is the scene of a New Earth soldier named Lyn Cassady ( George Clooney), under duress, focusing a high-energy glare on a still, silent goat - and killing it.
But the best sources believe that in real life, no kind of psychic projection leveled the animal. John Alexander, Channon's close friend and one of the models for Clooney's character, says that what felled the goat was "dim mak, a relatively obscure martial arts skill known in English as the death touch." On the phone from Las Vegas, where he lives, Alexander asks, "Have you ever seen a bullet wound in a body? You see not just a hole but a path of radiating energy. I saw the photos of the necropsy of that goat. And there was a similar path of energy across the chest - except there was no exit or entrance wound."
Alexander objects to the way Jon Ronson's book and Peter Straughan's screenplay erroneously connect this action to Channon's group and obscure the serious point behind the episode. An American army hero named Col. Nick Rowe explored the death touch - a light touch, not a heavy blow - as a method that hostages or POWs could use after days or weeks of physical weakening in captivity.
But Channon and Graff praise the movie for continually pushing its audience to think outside the banker's box of the traditional military-industrial complex.
Graff might practice precognition, but when he watched the film last week in Baltimore, he felt something else: "deja vu." Graff says the film gets several anecdotes dead right. The psychic who stops a hamster dead in its tracks - or, rather, stops it dead before it even hits the tracks of its rotating wheel?
"That was based on a Soviet test, but the Soviets staged the test with rabbits instead of hamsters." The use of remote viewing to rescue a U.S. general kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Italy? Joe McMoneagle, one of the Stargate psychics, won the Army's Legion of Merit "for providing information of critical value unobtainable from any other source on over 200 specific targets," including Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier, who was taken in Italy in December 1981 and rescued in 1982.
Some key scenes re-enact or echo several of Graff's pivotal experiences. In a skit straight out of an Abbott and Costello farce, two American military men discuss the need to ignite an inner-space race with the Soviets. At one point, our Cold War enemies thought that American authorities had experimented with ESP to communicate with the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.
International investigators uncovered a French hoax behind the Nautilus story. But the Soviets thought the hoax was a hoax - just another cover story - and raced full-bore into psychic research.
Graff says he had that same discussion with his commander at the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, right after he "instinctively" put his hands on a classified report of Soviet ESP research. That talk eventually led him to the top of Stargate. (Now he's convinced that the U.S. did perform ESP experiments with submarines.)
Graff objects to the film depicting American psychics recklessly ingesting LSD and even spiking eggs and water with acid. "Our work could not involve 'non-ordinary consciousness,' meaning - No drugs! Those parts were silly." But some of the movie's intimate observations genuinely connected to him, especially a near-death experience that opens Bridges' heart and brain to new human potential. Graff had one of those himself.
And the psychics' use of idiosyncratic warm-up techniques rang clatteringly true. One of Graff's men, an American Indian, "worked with beads" to prepare for remote viewing, and another listened to hard rock.
On the phone from Austin, Texas, the hard-rock man, Paul H. Smith, laughs as he adds, "But I'd listen to Dolly Parton, too! It was all to get me 'psyched up.' " When approached at Fort Meade to join the unit in 1983, he had what he calls "a 'Men in Black' moment" as he walked toward the ramshackle barracks. It was all so mysterious and exciting - and well-funded, despite the headquarters' appearance. He made the decision to join "in 10 seconds." The decrepit quarters helped Stargate hide in plain sight. Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, on a briefing tour, once peered under the deteriorating steps and asked "Where's the wino?"
"Remote viewing should be called 'remote perception,' " says Smith. His own most startling vision came with a huge audio component. In 1987, on a Friday, he was asked to answer the question, "What's important for us to know about the next few hours?" He received an impression of a large metallic structure in a body of water and, in the distance, an aircraft dropping two cylindrical, winged objects that made "a whirring, guttering sound." When he came in Monday, he learned that an Iraqi plane had struck the USS Stark with a couple of roaring winged Exocet missiles.
Smith says, "Pardon the pun, there's a tiny kernel of truth" when it comes to Channon's influence on the be-all-you-can-be, all-volunteer army. "And I shouldn't say tiny - Col. Channon isn't small." Smith has criticized "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for linking ESP and Channon's New Age mind experiments to Abu Ghraib, a connection that "doesn't stand up to scrutiny."
Graff and Channon agree. Graff says remote viewers are especially sensitive to "staying away from 'the dark side' because it usually comes back to haunt you." Channon abhors the way "four of my ideas out of 125" have been connected to psychological warfare and atrocities in Iraq in order to fit a predetermined thesis: "How does good stuff go bad?"
It certainly didn't go bad for these two men. Graff has continued to write books and lead seminars and workshops aimed at extending human instinct and perception. Channon lives "on an eco-homestead" and promotes a crusade dubbed "Operation Noble Steward," calling for a united global military to handle ecological problems.
Channon's First Earth Battalion never recruited psychics. But he believes that he saved lives in Vietnam by relying on hunter's skills that could be considered psychic. And he feels ESP is "necessary" for American successs in contemporary conflicts. "The secret of modern warfare is, don't get into danger zones. You can't do that without extended awareness."
So in the end, the entertaining farrago of make-believe and scrambled history in "The Men Who Stare At Goats" doesn't faze Channon. He compares his collision with Hollywood to "a 'meeting engagement.' That's when two armies bump into each other and make a mess. The ones that are quickest on their feet win. I've been quick in this case. So far it has been an amazingly successful engagement."
Spoken like an honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood Jedi warrior.
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
November 1, 2009
The makers of "The Men Who Stare At Goats" have planted this epigraph before the movie: "More of this is true than you would believe." But I heard one young man emerging from a preview saying, "I don't think any of this is true."
After all, who in their right mind would buy a story about a visionary Army officer embracing Eastern martial arts and West Coast encounter sessions, then recruiting new American fighting men who would "fall in love with everyone," "sense plant auras," "attain the power to pass through objects such as walls," "have out-of-body experiences" and "be able to hear and see other people's thoughts"? And who could accept that this battalion employed psychic powers to locate a hostage halfway around the world - and to stop the heart of a goat?
But that visionary, Bill Django, played by Jeff Bridges, is based on a real man, Jim Channon, who did his military-intelligence training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore County (and lived at the Colony in Towson when he was doing it). In the 1970s and 1980s, he did engage commanding officers and fellow members of the think tank Task Force Delta in his dream of transforming the military into a holistic band of brothers. They rewarded him by reading him official orders to become commander of the First Earth Battalion.
Of course, this battalion (in the film, the New Earth Army) was a mind-expanding network, not a formal fighting group, with no set address except Task Force Delta and maybe Mother Earth. Its members were among the first on the planet to keep in touch through e-mail
And many of the exploits that the filmmakers ascribe to Channon's troops were done just a few miles from Baltimore, at Fort Meade. The site was two crumbling barracks belonging to a Defense Intelligence Agency unit devoted to "remote viewing" - the term for envisioning an unseen target using extra-sensory perception. Dale Graff, a sometime-Marylander who now lives in Hamburg, Pa., directed the program and gave it an enduring name: "Stargate."
Channon's goal was to re-imagine the American soldier as a "warrior monk" - equally deft at war and peace, destruction and healing. Graff aimed to pursue untapped powers of perception while locating Cold War targets or drug smugglers through Stargate members' super-intuitions.
Both men have healthy appetites for humor and similar mixed feelings for the movie. On the phone from Hawaii, Channon says it's only "one-third accurate." But he salutes the moviemakers because "it's really hard in the modern world of the trivia hairball to get anything important out to the public ... and they have made it so the paranormal doesn't seem like witchcraft."
As a man with a talent for seeing a few days into the future, Graff, a subtle joker, wrote these words before he saw the movie: "I laughed at the ridiculous antics of the characters. ... [But] while we laugh, are we not also acknowledging something hidden within ourselves that can be uncovered?" Afterward, he considered his pre-review pretty accurate.
The film's surefire, black-comic attention-getter is the scene of a New Earth soldier named Lyn Cassady ( George Clooney), under duress, focusing a high-energy glare on a still, silent goat - and killing it.
But the best sources believe that in real life, no kind of psychic projection leveled the animal. John Alexander, Channon's close friend and one of the models for Clooney's character, says that what felled the goat was "dim mak, a relatively obscure martial arts skill known in English as the death touch." On the phone from Las Vegas, where he lives, Alexander asks, "Have you ever seen a bullet wound in a body? You see not just a hole but a path of radiating energy. I saw the photos of the necropsy of that goat. And there was a similar path of energy across the chest - except there was no exit or entrance wound."
Alexander objects to the way Jon Ronson's book and Peter Straughan's screenplay erroneously connect this action to Channon's group and obscure the serious point behind the episode. An American army hero named Col. Nick Rowe explored the death touch - a light touch, not a heavy blow - as a method that hostages or POWs could use after days or weeks of physical weakening in captivity.
But Channon and Graff praise the movie for continually pushing its audience to think outside the banker's box of the traditional military-industrial complex.
Graff might practice precognition, but when he watched the film last week in Baltimore, he felt something else: "deja vu." Graff says the film gets several anecdotes dead right. The psychic who stops a hamster dead in its tracks - or, rather, stops it dead before it even hits the tracks of its rotating wheel?
"That was based on a Soviet test, but the Soviets staged the test with rabbits instead of hamsters." The use of remote viewing to rescue a U.S. general kidnapped by the Red Brigade in Italy? Joe McMoneagle, one of the Stargate psychics, won the Army's Legion of Merit "for providing information of critical value unobtainable from any other source on over 200 specific targets," including Brig. Gen. James L. Dozier, who was taken in Italy in December 1981 and rescued in 1982.
Some key scenes re-enact or echo several of Graff's pivotal experiences. In a skit straight out of an Abbott and Costello farce, two American military men discuss the need to ignite an inner-space race with the Soviets. At one point, our Cold War enemies thought that American authorities had experimented with ESP to communicate with the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine.
International investigators uncovered a French hoax behind the Nautilus story. But the Soviets thought the hoax was a hoax - just another cover story - and raced full-bore into psychic research.
Graff says he had that same discussion with his commander at the Air Force's Foreign Technology Division, right after he "instinctively" put his hands on a classified report of Soviet ESP research. That talk eventually led him to the top of Stargate. (Now he's convinced that the U.S. did perform ESP experiments with submarines.)
Graff objects to the film depicting American psychics recklessly ingesting LSD and even spiking eggs and water with acid. "Our work could not involve 'non-ordinary consciousness,' meaning - No drugs! Those parts were silly." But some of the movie's intimate observations genuinely connected to him, especially a near-death experience that opens Bridges' heart and brain to new human potential. Graff had one of those himself.
And the psychics' use of idiosyncratic warm-up techniques rang clatteringly true. One of Graff's men, an American Indian, "worked with beads" to prepare for remote viewing, and another listened to hard rock.
On the phone from Austin, Texas, the hard-rock man, Paul H. Smith, laughs as he adds, "But I'd listen to Dolly Parton, too! It was all to get me 'psyched up.' " When approached at Fort Meade to join the unit in 1983, he had what he calls "a 'Men in Black' moment" as he walked toward the ramshackle barracks. It was all so mysterious and exciting - and well-funded, despite the headquarters' appearance. He made the decision to join "in 10 seconds." The decrepit quarters helped Stargate hide in plain sight. Rhode Island Sen. Claiborne Pell, on a briefing tour, once peered under the deteriorating steps and asked "Where's the wino?"
"Remote viewing should be called 'remote perception,' " says Smith. His own most startling vision came with a huge audio component. In 1987, on a Friday, he was asked to answer the question, "What's important for us to know about the next few hours?" He received an impression of a large metallic structure in a body of water and, in the distance, an aircraft dropping two cylindrical, winged objects that made "a whirring, guttering sound." When he came in Monday, he learned that an Iraqi plane had struck the USS Stark with a couple of roaring winged Exocet missiles.
Smith says, "Pardon the pun, there's a tiny kernel of truth" when it comes to Channon's influence on the be-all-you-can-be, all-volunteer army. "And I shouldn't say tiny - Col. Channon isn't small." Smith has criticized "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for linking ESP and Channon's New Age mind experiments to Abu Ghraib, a connection that "doesn't stand up to scrutiny."
Graff and Channon agree. Graff says remote viewers are especially sensitive to "staying away from 'the dark side' because it usually comes back to haunt you." Channon abhors the way "four of my ideas out of 125" have been connected to psychological warfare and atrocities in Iraq in order to fit a predetermined thesis: "How does good stuff go bad?"
It certainly didn't go bad for these two men. Graff has continued to write books and lead seminars and workshops aimed at extending human instinct and perception. Channon lives "on an eco-homestead" and promotes a crusade dubbed "Operation Noble Steward," calling for a united global military to handle ecological problems.
Channon's First Earth Battalion never recruited psychics. But he believes that he saved lives in Vietnam by relying on hunter's skills that could be considered psychic. And he feels ESP is "necessary" for American successs in contemporary conflicts. "The secret of modern warfare is, don't get into danger zones. You can't do that without extended awareness."
So in the end, the entertaining farrago of make-believe and scrambled history in "The Men Who Stare At Goats" doesn't faze Channon. He compares his collision with Hollywood to "a 'meeting engagement.' That's when two armies bump into each other and make a mess. The ones that are quickest on their feet win. I've been quick in this case. So far it has been an amazingly successful engagement."
Spoken like an honest-to-God, flesh-and-blood Jedi warrior.
Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
Remote Viewing Group at the Rhine
The Remote Viewer's group had another fantastic meeting last Wedensday.
Rich Krankoski, who was trained by Paul Smith and has worked as a Remote Viewer, led the group in a review of the fascinating history of Remote Viewing since the end of the US military program, and showed us some of his Remote Viewing sessions. He also shared with the group a video of an impressive Remote Viewing demonstration, and he discussed the film "The Men who Stare at Goats" which is currently in theaters. He also led us in a practice session for the group, and it went really well.
We then spent some time discussing our session and the processes we use in remote viewing. As always, it was a lively and enthusiastic group that included folks with a great deal of knowledge of RV as well as newcomers. If you would like to be on the group's email list, to keep informed of our meetings and other RV related news, please drop me a line at bbogle@triad.rr.com.
Rich Krankoski, who was trained by Paul Smith and has worked as a Remote Viewer, led the group in a review of the fascinating history of Remote Viewing since the end of the US military program, and showed us some of his Remote Viewing sessions. He also shared with the group a video of an impressive Remote Viewing demonstration, and he discussed the film "The Men who Stare at Goats" which is currently in theaters. He also led us in a practice session for the group, and it went really well.
We then spent some time discussing our session and the processes we use in remote viewing. As always, it was a lively and enthusiastic group that included folks with a great deal of knowledge of RV as well as newcomers. If you would like to be on the group's email list, to keep informed of our meetings and other RV related news, please drop me a line at bbogle@triad.rr.com.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Lively Teleconferences at the Rhine!
This is to alert everyone all over the world that we are bringing you more and more opportunities to join us via teleconference for very little expense! On Wednesday from 12-1pm EST we had a lively discussion with Jeffrey Mishlove calling in from Nevada to discuss his fascinating book The PK Man with a local group of discussants and nonlocal listeners.
As one listener wrote afterwards, "This was really so much fun to sit at my kitchen counter in Wilmington and hear you, Peggie, Marie, and Christine, et al. sharing ideas and experiences. Made me homesick, actually. The teleconferencing works beautifully and I hope to enjoy many more meetings."
Next teleconferenced program: Friday, 11/20th from 7:30-9pm EST will be Circling the Cosmos on a Dream, with Judy B. Gardiner --see website for more details.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
"HAUNTED PEOPLE" POTENTIALLY EXPLAINED:
A NEUROBIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR EXTRAORDINARY PERCEPTIONS
Vienna, Virginia (October 25, 2009) - There may be a genuine brain-body foundation for extraordinary perceptions, according to research presented in Science & Consciousness Review. The investigation suggests that reports of sensing a presence, seeing an apparition, or feeling energy around a person or place may be related to the workings of the limbic system - the "emotional brain" - as well as a personality type that rapidly registers feelings.
As surveys consistently show that half of all Americans say they've had an extra-sensory experience - with nearly one-quarter stating they've actually seen or felt a ghost - anomalous perceptions are nothing to shrug off, according to one of the researchers, Marc Micozzi, MD, PhD, a physician and medical anthropologist. "People have had these experiences down the ages and across cultures," he comments. "They're quite universal. What we've documented is that there's a certain type of person most likely to experience them."
That person is environmentally sensitive, according to Michael Jawer, an environmental consultant and associate of Micozzi's with specialization in the condition known as Sick Building Syndrome. "Our findings show that anomalous perception parallels other forms of environmental sensitivity, such as having pronounced or longstanding allergies, migraine headache, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, irritable bowel, even synesthesia (overlapping senses). Women make up the vast majority of this sensitive population but there are other markers: being ambidextrous, for instance, or recalling a traumatic childhood. The more we look at the people who claim they're psychic, the more it seems there's a mix of nature and nurture that predisposes them."
Drawing from ample evidence in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, the researchers posit that brain and body are effectively unified -- and that highly sensitive people react more strongly than others to what they're feeling as well as to incoming environmental stimuli. This raises the possibility, Jawer and Micozzi assert, that subliminal feelings and other environmental nuances could be picked up by individuals who are sufficiently sensitive. A reputedly "haunted" place, therefore, could exhibit stimuli that register more with certain people and less with others.
"The whole field is ripe for study," remarks Micozzi. "We have the technology today to study emotion as it's processed in the brain - why not widen the scope to study how feelings are felt, and perceptions registered, in the rest of the body." Jawer agrees. "This subject matter needn't be beyond the pale of science. What is needed is to take seriously what highly sensitive people are telling us, and investigate the brain-body basis of what they say they're feeling."
Journal reference: Jawer M. A Neurobiology of Sensitivity? Sentience as the Foundation for Unusual Conscious Perception. Science and Consciousness Review, January 17, 2007 DOI:
http://sciconrev.org/2007/01/a-neurobiology-of-sensitivity-sentience-as-the-foundation-for-unusual-conscious-perception/
Vienna, Virginia (October 25, 2009) - There may be a genuine brain-body foundation for extraordinary perceptions, according to research presented in Science & Consciousness Review. The investigation suggests that reports of sensing a presence, seeing an apparition, or feeling energy around a person or place may be related to the workings of the limbic system - the "emotional brain" - as well as a personality type that rapidly registers feelings.
As surveys consistently show that half of all Americans say they've had an extra-sensory experience - with nearly one-quarter stating they've actually seen or felt a ghost - anomalous perceptions are nothing to shrug off, according to one of the researchers, Marc Micozzi, MD, PhD, a physician and medical anthropologist. "People have had these experiences down the ages and across cultures," he comments. "They're quite universal. What we've documented is that there's a certain type of person most likely to experience them."
That person is environmentally sensitive, according to Michael Jawer, an environmental consultant and associate of Micozzi's with specialization in the condition known as Sick Building Syndrome. "Our findings show that anomalous perception parallels other forms of environmental sensitivity, such as having pronounced or longstanding allergies, migraine headache, chronic fatigue, chronic pain, irritable bowel, even synesthesia (overlapping senses). Women make up the vast majority of this sensitive population but there are other markers: being ambidextrous, for instance, or recalling a traumatic childhood. The more we look at the people who claim they're psychic, the more it seems there's a mix of nature and nurture that predisposes them."
Drawing from ample evidence in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, the researchers posit that brain and body are effectively unified -- and that highly sensitive people react more strongly than others to what they're feeling as well as to incoming environmental stimuli. This raises the possibility, Jawer and Micozzi assert, that subliminal feelings and other environmental nuances could be picked up by individuals who are sufficiently sensitive. A reputedly "haunted" place, therefore, could exhibit stimuli that register more with certain people and less with others.
"The whole field is ripe for study," remarks Micozzi. "We have the technology today to study emotion as it's processed in the brain - why not widen the scope to study how feelings are felt, and perceptions registered, in the rest of the body." Jawer agrees. "This subject matter needn't be beyond the pale of science. What is needed is to take seriously what highly sensitive people are telling us, and investigate the brain-body basis of what they say they're feeling."
Journal reference: Jawer M. A Neurobiology of Sensitivity? Sentience as the Foundation for Unusual Conscious Perception. Science and Consciousness Review, January 17, 2007 DOI:
http://sciconrev.org/2007/01/a-neurobiology-of-sensitivity-sentience-as-the-foundation-for-unusual-conscious-perception/
Taking a scientific approach to spooky
Sally Rhine Feather, of the Rhine Research Center, and lecturer Christine Simmonds-Moore pose Tuesday at the Forest at Duke, during “Scientific Excursions & Diversions,” a class presented by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
By Monica Chen
DURHAM — A boy with a lost dog leads his mother to it through his visions. A woman who wants to commit suicide gets a timely call from a friend hundreds of miles away. A gambler who, when “in the zone,” can somehow make the dice turn up any way he wants.
With just a few days to go before Halloween, some 120 senior citizens were treated to a presentation from the Rhine Research Center on extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and other topics in parapsychology, the scientific study of psychic abilities or of Psi, the psyche.
In between explanations of scientific methods used in documenting and testing paranormal phenomena, the experts on hand offered the audience information from the newest research.
For instance, there have been found precognitive physiological responses to emotional stimuli. In Great Britain, where lecturer Christine Simmonds-Moore is from, there have been studies of dreams where a “sender” would watch a clip and a “receiver” in a chamber that induces a dream-like state would describe the images in their minds.
There have also been studies of the body’s physiological response to emotional stimuli, indicating that some people have a sort of precognitive anticipation of trauma.
“Whatever the Psi mechanism,” said Sally Rhine Feather, executive director of the Rhine Center, “it’s probably built in as a warning.”
Feather is the daughter of Joseph Rhine, founder of the Duke University parapsychology lab that eventually became the Rhine Center, located at 2741 Campus Walk Ave.
Feather has been involved in the research since she was young, helping her father out in the lab and overseeing experiments like with the Zener cards, in which one participant looks at the card and the other participant has to guess what’s on it.
“It indicates that there may be more consciousness to the brain than chemicals,” Feather said of parapsychology. “All the major religions believe there is something more than the body. All cultures have talked about these things, but we take a scientific approach to prove them.”
The lecture was held by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which was founded by Duke Continuing Education and the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development to organize lectures, social events and other offerings for seniors.
Anthony Waraksa, host of the Symposia Program lectures, said they invited Feather and Simmonds-Moore because the talk would be timely and fun for Halloween. Waraksa said the scientific rigor of the studies was important.
“They go where humans don’t usually go,” Waraksa said. “They’re not afraid to say, ‘Let’s go check it out.’ ”
The most intriguing part of the lecture, to him, was precognition.
“Darwin has said we evolve to take advantage of our environment,” he said. “If some people have precognition, then it would be a great advantage.”
By Monica Chen
DURHAM — A boy with a lost dog leads his mother to it through his visions. A woman who wants to commit suicide gets a timely call from a friend hundreds of miles away. A gambler who, when “in the zone,” can somehow make the dice turn up any way he wants.
With just a few days to go before Halloween, some 120 senior citizens were treated to a presentation from the Rhine Research Center on extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and other topics in parapsychology, the scientific study of psychic abilities or of Psi, the psyche.
In between explanations of scientific methods used in documenting and testing paranormal phenomena, the experts on hand offered the audience information from the newest research.
For instance, there have been found precognitive physiological responses to emotional stimuli. In Great Britain, where lecturer Christine Simmonds-Moore is from, there have been studies of dreams where a “sender” would watch a clip and a “receiver” in a chamber that induces a dream-like state would describe the images in their minds.
There have also been studies of the body’s physiological response to emotional stimuli, indicating that some people have a sort of precognitive anticipation of trauma.
“Whatever the Psi mechanism,” said Sally Rhine Feather, executive director of the Rhine Center, “it’s probably built in as a warning.”
Feather is the daughter of Joseph Rhine, founder of the Duke University parapsychology lab that eventually became the Rhine Center, located at 2741 Campus Walk Ave.
Feather has been involved in the research since she was young, helping her father out in the lab and overseeing experiments like with the Zener cards, in which one participant looks at the card and the other participant has to guess what’s on it.
“It indicates that there may be more consciousness to the brain than chemicals,” Feather said of parapsychology. “All the major religions believe there is something more than the body. All cultures have talked about these things, but we take a scientific approach to prove them.”
The lecture was held by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which was founded by Duke Continuing Education and the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development to organize lectures, social events and other offerings for seniors.
Anthony Waraksa, host of the Symposia Program lectures, said they invited Feather and Simmonds-Moore because the talk would be timely and fun for Halloween. Waraksa said the scientific rigor of the studies was important.
“They go where humans don’t usually go,” Waraksa said. “They’re not afraid to say, ‘Let’s go check it out.’ ”
The most intriguing part of the lecture, to him, was precognition.
“Darwin has said we evolve to take advantage of our environment,” he said. “If some people have precognition, then it would be a great advantage.”
GHOST BUSTERS WILL SHARE PARANORMAL RESEARCH & METHODS
Dr, Sally Rhine Feather will be the keynote speaker, and Dr. Mark Leary will also be speaking at this upcoming Symposium at the Crystal Coast.
Science and spirits meet at the 2009 Paranormal Research Symposium which will take place on November 6 & 7 at the Carteret County Civic Center in Morehead City. Hosted by the very haunted and historic Webb Memorial Library and Civic Center, renowned North Carolina paranormal investigation teams will conduct research in some of Carteret County’s most haunted places.
Sign up as an investigation observer and accompany a team while they use science to hunt spirits at local sites said to be haunted. On November 6, share your local ghost story at “Dinner with the Ghosts of Carteret County” hosted by Rodney Kemp at the Sanitary Restaurant. On November 7, attend a day of seminars to hear the preliminary results of symposium investigations, and learn paranormal research, technology, and methodology from professional
investigators. All proceeds benefit Webb Library programs. Special ticket packages and student rates available. Visit http://www.paranormalsymposium.com/ or call the Webb Library at 252.726.3012 to learn more and to buy tickets.
2009 Paranormal Research Symposium Investigation Sites
NC Coast Communications
201 N 17th Street, Morehead City
Floyd’s 1921 Restaurant
400 Bridges Street, Morehead City
Carmike Cinema Triple
3017 Bridges Street, Morehead City
Private Residence
Beaufort
Webb Memorial Library
812 Evans Street, Morehead City
Old Burying Grounds
Beaufort, NC
Symposium Schedule
Observe an investigation. Join an investigation while they research a local haunted site. By reservation only. Call 252.726.3012. $50.
Friday, November 6, 7:00 p.m. Dinner with the Ghosts of Carteret County. True Stories of Local Hauntings. Special Presentation by Port City Tour Company. Share your ghost. Sanitary Restaurant. $28.
Saturday, November 7, Carteret County Civic Center • 9:30.—Professionalism in Paranormal Investigation. Ethics, integrity during investigations, analysis, & research conclusions. Paranormal Resource
Alliance, www.paranormal-resource-alliance.com/ $10.
Science and spirits meet at the 2009 Paranormal Research Symposium which will take place on November 6 & 7 at the Carteret County Civic Center in Morehead City. Hosted by the very haunted and historic Webb Memorial Library and Civic Center, renowned North Carolina paranormal investigation teams will conduct research in some of Carteret County’s most haunted places.
Sign up as an investigation observer and accompany a team while they use science to hunt spirits at local sites said to be haunted. On November 6, share your local ghost story at “Dinner with the Ghosts of Carteret County” hosted by Rodney Kemp at the Sanitary Restaurant. On November 7, attend a day of seminars to hear the preliminary results of symposium investigations, and learn paranormal research, technology, and methodology from professional
investigators. All proceeds benefit Webb Library programs. Special ticket packages and student rates available. Visit http://www.paranormalsymposium.com/ or call the Webb Library at 252.726.3012 to learn more and to buy tickets.
2009 Paranormal Research Symposium Investigation Sites
NC Coast Communications
201 N 17th Street, Morehead City
Floyd’s 1921 Restaurant
400 Bridges Street, Morehead City
Carmike Cinema Triple
3017 Bridges Street, Morehead City
Private Residence
Beaufort
Webb Memorial Library
812 Evans Street, Morehead City
Old Burying Grounds
Beaufort, NC
Symposium Schedule
Observe an investigation. Join an investigation while they research a local haunted site. By reservation only. Call 252.726.3012. $50.
Friday, November 6, 7:00 p.m. Dinner with the Ghosts of Carteret County. True Stories of Local Hauntings. Special Presentation by Port City Tour Company. Share your ghost. Sanitary Restaurant. $28.
Saturday, November 7, Carteret County Civic Center • 9:30.—Professionalism in Paranormal Investigation. Ethics, integrity during investigations, analysis, & research conclusions. Paranormal Resource
Alliance, www.paranormal-resource-alliance.com/ $10.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Spirit of the Badge: 60 True Police Stories of Divine Guidance, Miracles and Intuition
Author and officer with the Michigan State Police, Ingrid Dean, will be interviewed on Coast to Coast A.M. Radio with George Noory, this Friday, Oct. 9, from 1:30A - 4:30A.
This interview will focus on a new book, "Spirit of the Badge: 60 True Police Stories of Divine Guidance, Miracles & Intuition," a compilation of true police stories from officers all over the country. If you have ever listened to Coast to Coast Radio A.M., this will be a very fun-filled, entertaining, three-hour interview about all the outlandish, unexplainable and/or miraculous situations that police officers incur in their work. "Spirit of the Badge" is one of the first books to ever address unexplainable phenomena in law enforcement!
Coast to Coast A.M. Radio can be a very unusual, controversial radio show. The listening audience is very large. There are very interesting, but sometimes discordant people who call in. Please call into the station with your positive support! We believe extra reinforcement and positive backing by fellow officers is key to spreading this unique message about law enforcement!
Lastly, help support all the police officers who freely contributed their personal experiences to this book by spreading this E-Mail to all interested people you know---including fellow police officers, their families, and friends. Officers provided these stories from their hearts. You can view the book at www.spiritofthebadge.com .
Coast to Coast A.M. is on the Internet with "live" access. Simply tune in on your computer!
This interview will focus on a new book, "Spirit of the Badge: 60 True Police Stories of Divine Guidance, Miracles & Intuition," a compilation of true police stories from officers all over the country. If you have ever listened to Coast to Coast Radio A.M., this will be a very fun-filled, entertaining, three-hour interview about all the outlandish, unexplainable and/or miraculous situations that police officers incur in their work. "Spirit of the Badge" is one of the first books to ever address unexplainable phenomena in law enforcement!
Coast to Coast A.M. Radio can be a very unusual, controversial radio show. The listening audience is very large. There are very interesting, but sometimes discordant people who call in. Please call into the station with your positive support! We believe extra reinforcement and positive backing by fellow officers is key to spreading this unique message about law enforcement!
Lastly, help support all the police officers who freely contributed their personal experiences to this book by spreading this E-Mail to all interested people you know---including fellow police officers, their families, and friends. Officers provided these stories from their hearts. You can view the book at www.spiritofthebadge.com .
Coast to Coast A.M. is on the Internet with "live" access. Simply tune in on your computer!
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Stuart Hameroff Will Be Speaking at the Rhine on Thursday, October 1st
Could Life And Consciousness Be Related To The Fundamental Quantum Nature Of The Universe?
Consciousness defines our existence and reality. But how does the brain generate thoughts and feelings? Most explanations portray the brain as a computer, with nerve cells ("neurons") and their synaptic connections acting as simple switches, or "bits" which interact in complex ways. In this view consciousness is said to "emerge" as a novel property of complex interactions among neurons, as hurricanes and candle flames emerge from complex interactions among gas and dust molecules. However this approach fails to explain why we have feelings and awareness, an "inner life". So we don't know how the brain produces consciousness.
We also don't know if our conscious perceptions accurately portray the external world, or if we all have similar pictures of what lies outside our conscious minds. In fact, the fundamental nature of reality remains as mysterious as the mechanism for our conscious perceptions.
Consciousness defines our existence and reality. But how does the brain generate thoughts and feelings? Most explanations portray the brain as a computer, with nerve cells ("neurons") and their synaptic connections acting as simple switches, or "bits" which interact in complex ways. In this view consciousness is said to "emerge" as a novel property of complex interactions among neurons, as hurricanes and candle flames emerge from complex interactions among gas and dust molecules. However this approach fails to explain why we have feelings and awareness, an "inner life". So we don't know how the brain produces consciousness.
We also don't know if our conscious perceptions accurately portray the external world, or if we all have similar pictures of what lies outside our conscious minds. In fact, the fundamental nature of reality remains as mysterious as the mechanism for our conscious perceptions.
Be sure to come and hear more!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Spirituality In Action: Transpersonal Psychology - Healing a World in Crisis
Call for Proposals
(Submission Deadline is 31 August 2009)
Proposals for presentations are being accepted. Please submit all proposals online using this Online Proposal Submission Form.
Conference Themes
•Advancing Transpersonal Psychotherapy
•Bridging North/South Perspectives
•Living Socially Engaged Spirituality
•Exploring Global Consciousness
•Linking Ecology, Psychology and Spirituality
As the world confronts ecological and economic crises, transpersonal psychology offers innovative, holistic approaches to psychotherapy, health, healing trauma, social relationships and global consciousness. The 2010 Transpersonal Psychology Conference offers presentations, papers, workshops and speakers with a multidisciplinary and integrative approach to human potential, self-development, relationship and community.
You are invited to submit proposals online for the conference program. Presentations on the conference themes are encouraged, as well as other transpersonal psychology topics. Following are the formats for presentations.
•Paper Presentations: 1 hour 15 minutes
•Workshops: 2 hours. Workshops should be experiential
•Panels: 1 hour 15 minutes.
•Proposal Deadline: August 31, 2009
(Submission Deadline is 31 August 2009)
Proposals for presentations are being accepted. Please submit all proposals online using this Online Proposal Submission Form.
Conference Themes
•Advancing Transpersonal Psychotherapy
•Bridging North/South Perspectives
•Living Socially Engaged Spirituality
•Exploring Global Consciousness
•Linking Ecology, Psychology and Spirituality
As the world confronts ecological and economic crises, transpersonal psychology offers innovative, holistic approaches to psychotherapy, health, healing trauma, social relationships and global consciousness. The 2010 Transpersonal Psychology Conference offers presentations, papers, workshops and speakers with a multidisciplinary and integrative approach to human potential, self-development, relationship and community.
You are invited to submit proposals online for the conference program. Presentations on the conference themes are encouraged, as well as other transpersonal psychology topics. Following are the formats for presentations.
•Paper Presentations: 1 hour 15 minutes
•Workshops: 2 hours. Workshops should be experiential
•Panels: 1 hour 15 minutes.
•Proposal Deadline: August 31, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
An Interview with Larry Dossey
Larry Dossey will speak at Stedman Auditorium on July 24, 2009 from 7:30 - 9:00pm. See Rhine Website for more information and to purchase tickets.
1. What’s your book about?
Premonitions — knowing what’s about to happen.
2. What’s a premonition?
“Premonition” literally means “forewarning.” Premonitions are a heads-up about something just around the corner, something that is usually unpleasant. It may be a health crisis, a death in the family, or a national disaster.
But premonitions come in all flavors. Sometimes they provide information about positive, pleasant happenings that lie ahead — a job promotion, where the last remaining parking place is, or, in some instances, the winning lottery numbers.
3. A favorite example of yours?
Amanda, a young mother in Washington State, was awakened one night by a horrible dream. She dreamed that the chandelier in the next room had fallen from the ceiling onto her sleeping infant’s crib and crushed the baby. In the dream she saw a clock in the baby’s room that read 4:35, and that wind and rain were hammering the windows. Extremely upset, she awakened her husband and told him her dream. He said it was silly and to go back to sleep. But the dream was so frightening that Amanda went into the baby’s room and brought it back to bed with her. Soon she was awakened by a loud crash in the baby’s room. She rushed in to see that the chandelier had fallen and crushed the crib — and that the clock in the room read 4:35, and that wind and rain were howling outside. Her dream premonition was camera-like in detail, including the specific event, the precise time, and even a change in the weather.
4. Why are premonitions about unpleasant things? Why don’t we have premonitions about winning the lottery, the right stocks to pick, or when to bail out of the stock market?
Most researchers believe premonitions are trying to do us a favor. They are mainly about survival. If you know that something life-threatening is approaching, you have a chance to avoid it. This would increase your chance of staying alive and reproducing — our evolutionary imperative. That’s probably why premonitions are often about threats to our existence, why they have become built into our biology, and why probably everyone has a premonition sense to some degree.
5. Why did you write this book?
I actually tried not to write it. I largely ignored this stuff for years, but this didn’t work very well. My own experiences of premonitions grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
During my first year in medical practice as an internist, I had a dream premonition that shook me up and made me realize the world worked differently than I had been taught.
Briefly, I dreamed about a detailed event in the life of the young son of one of my physician colleagues. It turned out to be so accurate it scared me. There was no way I could have known about the event ahead of time.
Then patients of mine began telling me about their own premonitions.
Even my physician colleagues would occasionally open up and share their premonitions with me.
So I decided this was a well-kept secret in medicine that needed telling.
The time is right for this book because science has come onto the premonitions scene. There are now hundreds of experiments that confirm premonitions, which have been replicated by researchers all over the world.
So there’s a new story to tell. It’s no longer only about people’s experiences, but it’s also about science.
Many people still think this stuff is just mumbo-jumbo and that there’s no science to back it up. It’s the “everybody knows” argument — “everybody knows” you can’t see the future, so proof of premonitions cannot possibly exist.
That’s wrong. We now know we can see the future, because that’s what careful scientific studies show.
6. If people can see the future, why don’t they get rich playing the stock market?
Some do.
Researchers have tested CEOs of successful corporations for their ability to see the future, such as predicting a string of numbers they will be shown later. The CEOs who are good at this are usually those who are also highly successful in running their corporations. In other words, their precognitive ability correlates with their corporate success. CEOs who did not have this ability tend to have mediocre success rates in their corporations. So business success and premonition ability seem to go hand in hand.
In one study, experimenters were able to predict in advance the most successful corporate balance sheets by how well the CEOs did on tests that measured their ability to predict the future, such as a string of numbers they’d be shown later.
This ability was not dependent on reason or logic or inference. You can’t “reason” and “analyze” what a randomly chosen string of numbers is going to be.
Interestingly, these CEOs were shy about owning their premonition sense. They didn’t call their abilities premonitions, but good “business sense.” The polite word for premonitions in business is “business intuition.” There’s a growth industry in teaching business intuition. Google “business intuition” and you’ll come up with nearly a half million hits.
7. Do premonitions work for people in business who are not CEOs?
Yes.
I discuss several experiments in which people used their premonitions to make large sums of money in the silver futures market. One of these experiments was featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
8. So what keeps people from getting rich?
The limiting factor seems to be greed. When the subjects focused on making modest sums of money, the experiments worked; when they got greedy and tried to break the bank, the experiments flopped.
This reminds us of what happened on Wall Street beginning in the fall of ’08. Nearly all the pundits say the underlying reason for the crash was unbridled greed.
9. You talk about “evidence” for premonitions. But isn’t the evidence just anecdotes and people’s stories?
This field used to be only about stories, but that’s changed. There’s now a science of premonitions. For the first time in history, we can now use “premonition” and “science” in the same sentence.
Take the “presentiment” experiments that have been pioneered by consciousness researcher Dean Radin. Briefly, a person sits in front of a computer, which will make a random selection from a large collection of images that are of two types — calming or violent. Calming images may be a lovely scene from nature; violent images deal with death, carnage, grisly autopsies, and so on. The subject has some physiological function being measured, such as the electrical conductivity of the skin or the diameter of the pupil. The bodily function begins to change several seconds before the image is randomly selected by the computer and shown on the screen. Here’s the shocker: the physiological change occurs to a greater degree if the image to be shown is violent in nature. How is this possible? How does the body know which image is going to be shown in the future?
Dozens of these studies have been done by various researchers. They show that we have a built-in, unconscious ability to know the future. Somehow the body knows before our awareness kicks in.
There’s a charming quotation in the book The Secret Life of Bees that captures this. Fourteen-year-old Lilly says, “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.”
Another type of experiment is called “remote viewing,” in which people can consciously know highly detailed information up to a week before it happens. These studies were pioneered at Stanford Research Institute and have been replicated at Princeton University and elsewhere.
10. How can we know when to take a premonition seriously?
If the premonition is about your health or if it involves images of death, it’s wise to take it seriously. You might not get a second chance.
A patient of mine had a dream premonition of “three little white spots” on her left ovary. She feared this meant she had ovarian cancer. We checked it out. Her sonogram showed she was accurate; she indeed had three little “white spots” on her left ovary, but they were benign ovarian cysts, not cancerous. She did the right thing; she had a health-related premonition, and she checked it out.
If the premonition is extremely vivid — if it seems “realer than real” — take it seriously.
A cardiologist I know had a vivid dream that a patient of his had a stroke while he was doing a cardiac catheterization, which was scheduled for the next day. He wondered whether he should cancel the study, but he told himself that dreams mean nothing and pressed ahead. The next day, while actually doing the catheterization, his patient had a stroke in precisely the same pattern he dreamed. It shook him up and completely shifted his attitude about premonitions. Now he takes them seriously.
People can become very skilled in knowing when to take a premonition seriously. They develop a refined sense over time. Practice makes perfect.
11. What do your colleagues in medicine think about your book?
Nearly all of them are supportive.
I’ve discussed premonitions with hundreds of physicians in lectures at medical schools and hospitals all over the country. I was hesitant at first, thinking they’d all probably get up and walk out. The opposite happens. They open up and share their own stories.
Following a lecture at a Harvard-sponsored conference, one female internist told me, “I see numbers in my dreams — the actual lab values of my patients’ tests — before I even order them.”
Dr. Larry Kincheloe, an OB-GYN in Oklahoma City, knows ahead of time when his patients are going to deliver because he gets strange feelings in his chest when the time is near. It’s like an alarm goes off. This is so reliable that the OB nurses caring for his patients have learned to ask him how his chest feels, as a guide to when a patient will deliver.
It’s not just doctors, of course. George Soros, the billionaire investor, has all sorts of theories to back up his decisions. But according to his son, “At least half of this is bull….[T]he reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.”
This is like the presentiment experiments, in which the body knows something is going to happen and starts reacting before awareness kicks in. It’s a premonition in the form of physical symptoms.
Again, I’m reminded of fourteen-year-old Lilly in The Secret Life of Bees: “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.”
Nurses have been very supportive of my ideas. They are more open to premonitions than just about anyone. They spend more time at the bedside than doctors do. Over the years, nurses often become very precognitive. Many of them say they “just know” when a stable patient is going to have trouble, such as a cardiac arrest.
12. The subtitle of your book is “how knowing the future can shape our lives.” How can it?
Knowing the future can help you have a future.
Premonitions are often about survival. They warn us of future dangers — health problems, impending accidents, disasters, and so on.
For example, research shows that people often avoid riding on trains the day they crash, compared to normal days. On days of the crash, the vacancy rate on the train is unusually high.
This type of premonition is usually unconscious. People don’t say, “The train is going to crash. I’m cancelling my reservation.” They usually report a vague sense that something is wrong or doesn’t feel right, and they find some reason to change their plans.
People may avoid doomed planes as well. The vacancy rate on the four planes that crashed on 9-11 was around 80 percent. This suggests that lots of people found some reason not to travel on those planes that day. (We don’t know for certain what this means, however, because the airlines won’t release vacancy rates for travel on the same flights for the preceding months, so there’s no way to know for sure how unusual these high vacancy rates actually were.)
But perhaps the main way premonitions affect our lives is by giving us a different way of thinking about our own consciousness, our own mind.
I discuss experiments in which consciousness can operate both into the future and into the past. This suggests that time does not limit what our consciousness can do.
This raises the possibility that our consciousness is timeless. This opens up the possibility of immortality and the survival of some aspect of our consciousness following death.
13. Can we learn to have premonitions? Can we cultivate them?
Yes.
The main thing is not to try too hard. Premonitions usually come unbidden. They largely “do” us; we don’t “do” them.
So the trick is to invite them, not compel them, into your life.
First, simply realize that these experiences are extremely common, and that it’s likely that you will experience them.
Second, keep a dream journal, because premonitions occur most frequently during dreams. Record your dreams as soon as possible on waking. Most people find that premonitions become more frequent when they do this.
Third, learn to quiet your body and mind. Sit down, shut up, be quiet, and pay attention. Some people call this meditation; others simply call it “getting quiet.” Research shows that skilled meditators perform better on premonition experiments than just about anyone. Meditation opens a door to premonitions and helps us notice them when they occur.
Fourth, read about premonitions. What are they like for other people? This will help you recognize your own premonitions, and when to take them seriously.
14. You say that most premonitions are unconscious?
Yes.
Most premonitions occur in dreams. Dreams by definition are unconscious.
And many experiments show that people’s bodies react to future events even before they happen, without their being aware of it.
15. But if premonitions are largely unconscious, how can we make use of them?
Premonitions don’t have to be a detailed snapshot of the future, of which we’re fully aware, to be helpful. They can be just a hunch or a gut feeling that we act on without consciously knowing why.
Some researchers believe unconscious premonitions are the most valuable kind. If we unconsciously know something is going to happen, we can react without processing this information by thinking about it. Thinking takes time. In dangerous situations we need to act quickly, immediately, without wasting time through reason and intellectual analysis.
As a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, I knew many soldiers who swore they had some sixth sense that kept them alive by alerting them to danger. They’d react instantly without thinking, as if “on automatic.” I suggest they were using premonitions.
I discuss an event in which an entire group of church members were late for choir practice one weekday night at a little church in Beatrice, Nebraska. The church exploded, and would almost certainly have killed them had they been there. The odd thing is that none of them had any conscious premonition that the explosion would occur, but they stayed away nonetheless. Being late was an unconscious behavior, and it saved their life.
This sort of behavior is very common among mothers. They often have “just a feeling” their baby is headed for trouble, and they act on this impression without knowing why. The term “mother wit,” once very common, captured this idea.
16. Is there a downside to premonitions?
Yes.
Anything can be taken to extremes.
I’ve known a few individuals who won’t make major decisions without consulting a psychic. They become slaves to somebody else’s premonitions about the future.
Premonitions can be false. The mind plays tricks — sometimes dirty tricks. Hallucinations happen. Just like we can have false memories of the past, we can have false impressions of the future.
17. So how can we avoid being misled by premonitions?
It’s pretty simple.
Premonitions are a single way of knowing the future, not the only way.
Whenever possible — in non-emergencies — we should rely on multiple sources of information — logic, reason, and analysis, plus intuition, hunches, and premonitions.
Multiple strands of information help guard against bad decisions. When we rely on only one source of knowing, we can get into trouble.
This is common sense: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
18. Skeptics say we can’t know the future. When we appear to do so, it’ s just a chance happening. What about this?
The skeptics have a point.
No doubt some premonitions that seem to come true are nothing more than chance happenings or lucky hits.
But to say that all the billions of people throughout human history who have experienced premonitions that turned out to be valid are deluded seems highly unlikely.
Skeptics often single out examples of premonitions that are silly or nutty, then generalize to condemn all premonitions. This is irrational.
Or they say that people have selective memories. They only remember the premonitions that come true, and forget those that don’t. This is simply not true; people often recall premonitions that don’t pan out.
But even if valid premonitions are statistically unlikely, as the skeptics claim, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are false. Many things that are rare are nonetheless real. It is extremely unlikely that any particular individual can run a four-minute mile. But a few people can. It’s unfair to use statistics to dismiss rare events.
But the premise of my book is that these events are not rare at all, but very common.
Most skeptics are poorly informed. They simply ignore the experiments showing that people can sense the future, because these studies create huge holes in their arguments.
Many skeptics will not be persuaded that premonitions are real, no matter how compelling the evidence is.
Personal experience is probably the best argument against the skeptics of premonitions.
I give several examples in which a skeptical spouse profoundly disagreed about whether or not his or her partner’s premonition should be taken seriously. But when the premonition came true, the skeptical spouse came round to a different way of thinking. An example is Amanda’s precognitive dream that a falling chandelier would crush their baby in its crib. The husband dismissed it as silly. But when she removed the baby from the crib and the chandelier actually fell and demolished the crib, precisely as she had dreamed, her doubting husband changed his tune.
Cases like this suggest that the best evidence for premonitions is not argument or even experimental evidence, but personal experience.
19. Your book sounds a lot like the bestselling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. He says we can know something is going to happen and make accurate snap decisions without knowing why.
You’re right. I love the examples Gladwell uses. Many of them are what I’m calling premonitions — firemen who leave a burning room before the floor collapses, without knowing why they are doing so; George Soros’s predicting world markets without rationally knowing why; Vic Braden, the famous tennis coach, who can predict double faults with extreme accuracy without a clue about how he does it.
Gladwell regards this kind of knowing as a big fat mystery. He says we should “accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments….[W]e’re better off that way”.
I don’t think we’re better off that way. Gladwell literally endorses ignorance, which I find baffling. He completely ignores research such as the presentiment experiments. The term “premonition” does not even appear in his book. There is a great deal of evidence — an entire chapter in my book — that can shed light on what Gladwell dismisses as a total mystery. Why he won’t go there is unclear to me. Like many other science journalists, he’s reluctant to acknowledge that consciousness can operate outside the present and beyond the body. Although I agree with Gladwell that there’s mystery in all this, it’s not as dense as he says. We know a lot about premonitions — their characteristics, what favors them, and what purposes they serve.
Some outstanding scientists are willing to consider premonitions as an explanation for the kind of knowing that Gladwell describes. Among them is Paul Drayson, Britain’s science minister. In discussing Gladwell’s book Blink, Drayson says he has personally known in advance that something is going to happen. He says, “In my life there have been some things that I’ve known and I don’t know why…like a sixth sense.’” “Sixth sense” is a common term for premonitions.
20. OK, so there’s evidence that premonitions are real. It’s still mind-boggling. How could these things possibly happen?
I agree that premonitions seem impossible — but only if we hold onto our common-sense beliefs about how the world works.
Most people believe that our minds are confined to the present and to the brain and body. To make a place for premonitions, we have to go beyond these core beliefs.
True, it seems as if we’re locked into our individual brains and bodies and the present, but the evidence from hundreds of experiments shows that this is an illusion.
Scientists don’t really know what time is. We assume it flows in one direction, which prohibits premonitions. But no experiment in the history of science has ever shown that time flows in one direction, or that it flows at all. Alternative views of time are downright cordial to premonitions.
For example, physicists talk about “closed time-like loops” that can carry information from the future into the present. This is one way premonitions might work.
Others suggest that the future is already present, already laid out, in what is called a “block universe.” During premonitions, we might gain access to this already-present information.
Other researchers suggest that the mind is nonlocal, which is a fancy word for infinite. According to this idea, consciousness is present everywhere in space and time. This means that we have access to all the information that has ever existed or will exist — past, present, and future. This opens the door for premonitions.
These are all hypotheses, of course.
The main point is that our common-sense ideas about time, space, matter, and our own minds are flawed. The universe works differently than we supposed.
In view of our ignorance, we need to stay open to the evidence for premonitions and not fall back into our prejudices, as when skeptics say, “Everybody knows premonitions are impossible.”
Often in science and medicine we know that something happens before we understand how it happens. Explanations sometimes come much later. So it may be with premonitions.
21. If I can see the future, doesn’t that mean it is already in place and is fixed? Don’t premonitions do away with free will and freedom of choice?
No.
Just because you glimpse how the future is likely to unfold does not mean you can’t act to change it. When Amanda (see question 3 above) dreamed that the chandelier fell and crushed her sleeping infant, she removed the baby from the crib. The chandelier did fall, but the baby’s life was saved. She exercised her freedom of choice, and it made a life-and-death difference. There are thousands of similar examples.
Philosophers often argue against premonitions because they say premonitions destroy freedom of choice. But people who have premonitions usually don’t see it that way. Like Amanda, their personal experiences with premonitions say they do have a choice. They can act, and they do, to change the future they’ve glimpsed.
I agree with the idea that the future is probable, not fixed. According to this view, the future is is fluid and subject to change. So a premonition is not inevitable.
Probability varies, of course. This means that some futures may be easier to change than others. It was easier for Amanda to act on her premonition and remove her baby from danger than for an individual to prevent an earthquake she dreamed about. Some futures may be so probable they will happen; others, perhaps most, are malleable.
22. What’s the Big Lesson from premonitions?
Premonitions are an incredible gift.
Although they are an aid to our physical survival, their main contribution is in providing us with an expanded vision of who we are and what our destiny may be. They show that we’re more than a physical brain and body. Brains can’t operate outside the present or beyond the body. But our consciousness can, as premonitions show.
Premonitions reveal that we’re not slaves to the body or to the present. We can operate outside of time; something about us is timeless.
The implications are quite wonderful, because they imply immortality.
Not a small contribution.
THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS
“For anyone who is interested in knowing about the deeper meaning of our existence, this book is a must read. Once again, Larry, being the pioneer that he is, has written a classic.” —Deepak Chopra, M.D., author of Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment
THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives
Larry Dossey, M.D.
Author of the New York Times Bestseller Healing Words
Some arrive as dramatic, vibrantly detailed dreams. Others sneak in as vague, gnawing gut feelings. They range from revealing the trivial, like where to find missing keys, to foreshadowing disasters, destruction, and death. Regardless of their form or focus, premonitions are universal, scientifically verifiable, and vital facts of life.
“I believe that to be alive is to have premonitions,” declares respected spiritual trailblazer and bestselling author Larry Dossey, M.D. “Premonitions are not something we can avoid. They are our birthright.” In his latest groundbreaking book, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives (Dutton; May 2009; $25.95), Dr. Dossey confirms the validity of these remarkably common, uncanny occurrences and makes sense of their paradoxical nature. What’s more, he opens minds to acknowledging, cultivating, and acting on premonitions to not only avert dangers, but strengthen bonds with loved ones, connect with strangers, and change the world.
During his first year in medical practice, Dr. Dossey had a vivid dream about the young son of a physician colleague that predicted a series of events with chilling accuracy. After three decades of wrestling with questions about how and why premonitions happen, the author decided to do what he does best: delve into science to demystify the mystical. Combing the neurological, psychiatric, and parapsychological literature in search of answers, he found overwhelming empirical evidence to support premonitions as a real, natural phenomenon with a critical role in our universe. As Dr. Dossey reveals, backed by compelling true stories and computer-based experiments, nearly everyone has the ability to know the future. Yet, because it usually operates outside our conscious awareness, this innate gift is widely denied and ignored, often at significant personal toll and sometimes others’ peril.
Grounded in rigorous scientific research and actual cases, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS sheds light on:
In the final section, Dr. Dossey explores the potential of premonitions to help us see and change not only the future, but the past as well. He offers a vision for revolutionizing our understanding of time, space, and consciousness.
Insightful, enlightening, and riveting, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS is a book for anyone fascinated by the possibilities of foreknowledge and everyone who’s experienced an unshakable hunch or unforgettable dream about the future. While a firm believer in taking premonitions seriously, Dr. Dossey cautions against exploiting premonitions for selfish aims or protection against risks and surprises. “Future knowing is a valuable quality,” he affirms, “but we should hope that it never eradicates all the mysteries of life.”
About the Author
LARRY DOSSEY, M.D., is a respected leader in bringing scientific understanding to spirituality and an internationally influential advocate of the role of spirituality in healthcare and wellness. During his distinguished career as a practitioner of integrative medicine, he helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association and served as Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital. The author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller Healing Words, he is executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey has lectured all over world and at major medical schools and hospitals in the United States—Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the Mayo Clinic, among others. A native Texan, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For more information, visit:
www.dosseydossey.com
THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives
Larry Dossey, M.D.
Author of the New York Times Bestseller Healing Words
Some arrive as dramatic, vibrantly detailed dreams. Others sneak in as vague, gnawing gut feelings. They range from revealing the trivial, like where to find missing keys, to foreshadowing disasters, destruction, and death. Regardless of their form or focus, premonitions are universal, scientifically verifiable, and vital facts of life.
“I believe that to be alive is to have premonitions,” declares respected spiritual trailblazer and bestselling author Larry Dossey, M.D. “Premonitions are not something we can avoid. They are our birthright.” In his latest groundbreaking book, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS: How Knowing the Future Can Shape Our Lives (Dutton; May 2009; $25.95), Dr. Dossey confirms the validity of these remarkably common, uncanny occurrences and makes sense of their paradoxical nature. What’s more, he opens minds to acknowledging, cultivating, and acting on premonitions to not only avert dangers, but strengthen bonds with loved ones, connect with strangers, and change the world.
During his first year in medical practice, Dr. Dossey had a vivid dream about the young son of a physician colleague that predicted a series of events with chilling accuracy. After three decades of wrestling with questions about how and why premonitions happen, the author decided to do what he does best: delve into science to demystify the mystical. Combing the neurological, psychiatric, and parapsychological literature in search of answers, he found overwhelming empirical evidence to support premonitions as a real, natural phenomenon with a critical role in our universe. As Dr. Dossey reveals, backed by compelling true stories and computer-based experiments, nearly everyone has the ability to know the future. Yet, because it usually operates outside our conscious awareness, this innate gift is widely denied and ignored, often at significant personal toll and sometimes others’ peril.
Grounded in rigorous scientific research and actual cases, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS sheds light on:
- How premonitions often herald tragedy…and how premonitions often save lives. Among many striking instances, Dr. Dossey shares how a young mother in Washington State took a frightening dream seriously, over her husband’s laughter, and saved her infant from being crushed by a fallen chandelier; how an Oklahoma City obstetrician learned to trust his chest pains as signals of impending delivery to improve patient care; and how hundreds of individuals all over the country had premonitory dreams prior to the events of 9/11. On that shattering day, many also followed their hunches and cancelled travel plans at the last minute. American Airlines Flight 77, for example, had a 78 percent vacancy rate when it crashed into the Pentagon.
- The value and routine practice of employing premonitions in business. Along with exposing “business intuition” for what it really is—a knack for predicting business cycles, trends, and strengths—Dr. Dossey spotlights experiments using premonitions to make money. Incredibly, two different series of trials of remote viewers’ success at picking winning stocks were right on the money—until greed became the objective. The lesson? Purity of purpose pays off.
- How premonitions are as much about feeling as seeing. Based on breakthrough studies by established consciousness researchers, the body undergoes physiological changes—increases in sweat gland activity and heart rate among them—in anticipation of danger. As Dr. Dossey points out, these “presentiment experiments” demonstrate, under double-blind conditions, that when the average person is about to see an emotional picture, he or she will respond before that picture appears.
- Why we should want to cultivate premonitions and how to do it. As Dr. Dossey makes clear, even when they present a fragmentary picture or a mere inkling, premonitions serve as welcome guides to navigating the future with confidence and compassion. For those who aspire to become more premonition-prone, he urges getting comfortable with ambiguity and chaos; embracing a sense of the “transcendent”—a certainty that there is something more than the here-and-now—and the unity of all life; respecting the unconscious; and staying attentive and positive. He also advocates employing common sense, with practices like keeping a dream journal.
In the final section, Dr. Dossey explores the potential of premonitions to help us see and change not only the future, but the past as well. He offers a vision for revolutionizing our understanding of time, space, and consciousness.
Insightful, enlightening, and riveting, THE POWER OF PREMONITIONS is a book for anyone fascinated by the possibilities of foreknowledge and everyone who’s experienced an unshakable hunch or unforgettable dream about the future. While a firm believer in taking premonitions seriously, Dr. Dossey cautions against exploiting premonitions for selfish aims or protection against risks and surprises. “Future knowing is a valuable quality,” he affirms, “but we should hope that it never eradicates all the mysteries of life.”
About the Author
LARRY DOSSEY, M.D., is a respected leader in bringing scientific understanding to spirituality and an internationally influential advocate of the role of spirituality in healthcare and wellness. During his distinguished career as a practitioner of integrative medicine, he helped establish the Dallas Diagnostic Association and served as Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital. The author of eleven books, including the New York Times bestseller Healing Words, he is executive editor of Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. Dr. Dossey has lectured all over world and at major medical schools and hospitals in the United States—Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the Mayo Clinic, among others. A native Texan, he lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
For more information, visit:
www.dosseydossey.com
Thursday, July 2, 2009
A Message from Charley Tart
I’m writing you because you’re probably interested in developments in the areas I’ve researched, such as parapsychology, consciousness, meditation, altered states of consciousness, postmortem survival and spirituality.
My most important book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together has just been published. Too many people in modern life suffer uselessly by denying and repressing their spiritual desires and experiences because they think science has proven that all spirituality is nonsense or crazy. This book is intended to help them by showing that, using the best kind of science in the field of parapsychology, this materialistic denial of the spiritual is not actually scientific; it’s a dogmatic denial that’s factually wrong, based on a rigid, dismissive philosophy of materialism. People sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect a spiritual being to have when tested in the best kinds of scientific studies. You can read more about the book at the bottom of the first page on my archival web site.
Many of you know I’ve been putting my more interesting and readable research papers on My Website. This includes realistic career advice for those who want to study consciousness and related areas like parapsychology. There are also links to the more reliable sites on parapsychology, and a place to sign up for my “Studentnotices” list.
Studentnotices is a list you can sign up for to get occasional – from once or twice a month to several times a week – email notices about things that I think are of interest to people interested in the nature of mind and the human spirit. I may describe interesting new books I’ve seen, conferences coming up, and my scheduled lectures and workshops.
Finally, I’ve been working as a scientist in these areas for more than 50 years, now, and while it’s a deep part of me, I’m tired of sharing my knowledge only in this formal way. So I’ve started a blog, where I write not simply as a scientist but as a spiritual seeker, a teacher, a professor who built and uses his own little bulldozer, a former martial artist, etc., etc., kind of the “full spectrum Charley Tart” instead of just “Professor Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.” I’ve started it by posting transcripts from one of my classes on mindfulness and meditation, and an interesting discussion is already going on as people respond to some of that material. Visit my blog
Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.
Professor, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto CA
Professor Emeritus, Psychology, University of California, Davis
Home page & archives
Editor, The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences
My most important book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together has just been published. Too many people in modern life suffer uselessly by denying and repressing their spiritual desires and experiences because they think science has proven that all spirituality is nonsense or crazy. This book is intended to help them by showing that, using the best kind of science in the field of parapsychology, this materialistic denial of the spiritual is not actually scientific; it’s a dogmatic denial that’s factually wrong, based on a rigid, dismissive philosophy of materialism. People sometimes show the kinds of qualities we would expect a spiritual being to have when tested in the best kinds of scientific studies. You can read more about the book at the bottom of the first page on my archival web site.Many of you know I’ve been putting my more interesting and readable research papers on My Website. This includes realistic career advice for those who want to study consciousness and related areas like parapsychology. There are also links to the more reliable sites on parapsychology, and a place to sign up for my “Studentnotices” list.
Studentnotices is a list you can sign up for to get occasional – from once or twice a month to several times a week – email notices about things that I think are of interest to people interested in the nature of mind and the human spirit. I may describe interesting new books I’ve seen, conferences coming up, and my scheduled lectures and workshops.
Finally, I’ve been working as a scientist in these areas for more than 50 years, now, and while it’s a deep part of me, I’m tired of sharing my knowledge only in this formal way. So I’ve started a blog, where I write not simply as a scientist but as a spiritual seeker, a teacher, a professor who built and uses his own little bulldozer, a former martial artist, etc., etc., kind of the “full spectrum Charley Tart” instead of just “Professor Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.” I’ve started it by posting transcripts from one of my classes on mindfulness and meditation, and an interesting discussion is already going on as people respond to some of that material. Visit my blog
Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.
Professor, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto CA
Professor Emeritus, Psychology, University of California, Davis
Home page & archives
Editor, The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences
Remote Viewing Expo online!
It's time for the first-ever REMOTE VIEWING EXPO online!
July 2009 is TKR's sixth anniversary! To celebrate, they are bringing together online some of the coolest events, people and 'stuff' in Remote Viewing. All free of course, for all viewers of course, check it out!
TKR WELCOMES GARY LANGFORD * JOSEPH W. MCMONEAGLE * DR. RICHARD BROUGHTON * DR. EDWIN C. MAY * DR. DEAN RADIN * DR. CHARLES T. TART * DR. JESSICA UTTS * NANCY MCMONEAGLE * STEPHAN SCHWARTZ * RUSSELL TARG
VISIT THE EXPO HOME
* WE HAVE NEW INTERVIEWS! * WE HAVE RV TASKING! GO VIEW! PRIZES TOO!
* WE HAVE LIVE CHAT CONFERENCES! * WE HAVE GROOVY NEW VIDEOS! *
First Up: GARY LANGFORD Very seldom seen in public in this field (in fact, this may be his first-ever 'appearance' besides some previous talk on TKR's forum!), we are honored to host Gary Langford for some Q&A. Gary provided remote viewing for science research from the 1970s until the 1990s, and was a key participant in projects now collectively known as STAR GATE. Gary is in LIVE CHAT CONFERENCE July 2nd at 10:00pm Eastern at the Dojo Psi
Remote Viewing Chat
Come tell Gary hello, ask questions if you've got them!
You can find Gary's RV EXPO page here
Over the next week his page will acquire more info like an email interview,
some archived notes from him, plus a transcript, so check back.
TKR is a field-wide free community project "by viewers, for viewers" and
welcomes folks of all backgrounds, psi methods and philosophies.
TEN THOUSAND ROADS REMOTE VIEWING AND DOWSING PROJECT
TKR HANDS-ON REMOTE VIEWING
TKR REMOTE VIEWING DISCUSSION FORUM
July 2009 is TKR's sixth anniversary! To celebrate, they are bringing together online some of the coolest events, people and 'stuff' in Remote Viewing. All free of course, for all viewers of course, check it out!
TKR WELCOMES GARY LANGFORD * JOSEPH W. MCMONEAGLE * DR. RICHARD BROUGHTON * DR. EDWIN C. MAY * DR. DEAN RADIN * DR. CHARLES T. TART * DR. JESSICA UTTS * NANCY MCMONEAGLE * STEPHAN SCHWARTZ * RUSSELL TARG
VISIT THE EXPO HOME
* WE HAVE NEW INTERVIEWS! * WE HAVE RV TASKING! GO VIEW! PRIZES TOO!
* WE HAVE LIVE CHAT CONFERENCES! * WE HAVE GROOVY NEW VIDEOS! *
First Up: GARY LANGFORD Very seldom seen in public in this field (in fact, this may be his first-ever 'appearance' besides some previous talk on TKR's forum!), we are honored to host Gary Langford for some Q&A. Gary provided remote viewing for science research from the 1970s until the 1990s, and was a key participant in projects now collectively known as STAR GATE. Gary is in LIVE CHAT CONFERENCE July 2nd at 10:00pm Eastern at the Dojo Psi
Remote Viewing Chat
Come tell Gary hello, ask questions if you've got them!
You can find Gary's RV EXPO page here
Over the next week his page will acquire more info like an email interview,
some archived notes from him, plus a transcript, so check back.
TKR is a field-wide free community project "by viewers, for viewers" and
welcomes folks of all backgrounds, psi methods and philosophies.
TEN THOUSAND ROADS REMOTE VIEWING AND DOWSING PROJECT
TKR HANDS-ON REMOTE VIEWING
TKR REMOTE VIEWING DISCUSSION FORUM
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
announcing a conference on Health, Mental Health and Exceptional human experiences
Liverpool Hope University will be hosting an exciting conference on Health, Mental Health and Exceptional Human Experiences on monday 7th September.Liverpool Hope University is an ecumenical university with a mission statement addressing mind, body and spirit, and the psychology department also has an active parapsychology research group.
The objectives of the conference are as follows:
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the interaction between mind and body
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the overlap between exceptional human experiences and physical health/well being
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the overlap between exceptional human experiences and mental health/well being
•An opportunity for the development of greater insight and understanding of exceptional human experiences in an applied context.
The conference will be a one day event, comprising two main sessions:
One on belief mind and body [including the placebo effect/how the mind might be involved in the healing process; the effects of belief on the efficacy of drugs/healing/mental health; [Religious] faith and health/mental health; Exploring and understanding anomalous healing effects - a review of distant healing effects; Hypnosis and (self) healing; exploring "will or intention" from a mainstream perspective; Altered states of consciousness, mental imagery and healing].
The second will be on mental health and exceptional human experiences [including exploring the overlaps between clinical psychology and paranormal experiences; Clinical parapsychology in practice; Exploring the differences between healthy and unhealthy exceptional human experiences; exploring ways of manipulating/controlling pathological/healthy anomalous experiences; Spiritual and paranormal emergencies; The flow state, mental health and optimal performance; Healthy and unhealthy reactions to extreme events; Meditation and mental health ].
Speakers include the following: John Gruzelier, Isabel Clarke, Stefan Schmidt, Eberhard Bauer, Martina Belz, David Luke, Ian Tierney, Christine Simmonds-Moore, Carl Williams, Diane Dutton, Nicola Holt and Ginette Nachman.
Registration for the event opened on monday 8th June (a registrationform may be downloaded from our website http://hopelive.hope.ac.uk/psychology/para/HealthConference.html),We hope to see you on September 7th,
The objectives of the conference are as follows:
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the interaction between mind and body
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the overlap between exceptional human experiences and physical health/well being
•To provide a forum for cross disciplinary discussion on the overlap between exceptional human experiences and mental health/well being
•An opportunity for the development of greater insight and understanding of exceptional human experiences in an applied context.
The conference will be a one day event, comprising two main sessions:
One on belief mind and body [including the placebo effect/how the mind might be involved in the healing process; the effects of belief on the efficacy of drugs/healing/mental health; [Religious] faith and health/mental health; Exploring and understanding anomalous healing effects - a review of distant healing effects; Hypnosis and (self) healing; exploring "will or intention" from a mainstream perspective; Altered states of consciousness, mental imagery and healing].
The second will be on mental health and exceptional human experiences [including exploring the overlaps between clinical psychology and paranormal experiences; Clinical parapsychology in practice; Exploring the differences between healthy and unhealthy exceptional human experiences; exploring ways of manipulating/controlling pathological/healthy anomalous experiences; Spiritual and paranormal emergencies; The flow state, mental health and optimal performance; Healthy and unhealthy reactions to extreme events; Meditation and mental health ].
Speakers include the following: John Gruzelier, Isabel Clarke, Stefan Schmidt, Eberhard Bauer, Martina Belz, David Luke, Ian Tierney, Christine Simmonds-Moore, Carl Williams, Diane Dutton, Nicola Holt and Ginette Nachman.
Registration for the event opened on monday 8th June (a registrationform may be downloaded from our website http://hopelive.hope.ac.uk/psychology/para/HealthConference.html),We hope to see you on September 7th,
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Haunted house tale
Duke's parapsychology lab gives author a plot, campus setting
BY SALEM MACKNEE - Correspondent Published: Sun, Jun. 21, 2009
While you're taking your staycation this summer and dining on local foods, you can also enjoy a classic haunted house story with a decidedly local flavor.
Alexandra Sokoloff says the idea for "The Unseen" came to her when she learned that 700 boxes of files from Duke University's Rhine parapsychology lab had been opened to the public.
The same discovery propels Laurel MacDonald, the heroine of "The Unseen," into a field experiment re-creating a (fictional) Rhine poltergeist study.
Laurel and a handsome colleague break out the old ESP cards and sign up students for testing. The two high scorers and the two professors, plus a small fortune in high-tech ghost-hunting equipment, move into the same house where a similar group held a shadowy experiment nearly 45 years earlier.
Laurel discovers after the experiment starts that everyone involved in the earlier one either died or went insane -- including her own uncle, whose lingering psychic attachment to the house becomes clear from his visits to her dreams.
The fictional "Folger House" provides another delightful North Carolina connection: It's based on the mansion in Southern Pines that houses the Weymouth Center , which among its many attractions offers a writer's retreat. Sokoloff spent a week there with several fellow writers to soak up the atmosphere. She faithfully reproduces the floor plan and many furnishings but concocts a lurid family history for the "Folger House" to account for its extreme paranormal activity.
Besides the dreams, there are classic poltergeist manifestations: a rain of rocks, pounding noises in the walls, paintings turned upside down while a room is empty. And what would a haunted house story be without a cracking good séance?
There's also plenty of sexual tension in "The Unseen," as everyone staying in the house is young, good-looking and brimming with hormones.
Anyone familiar with Duke will enjoy the campus backdrop, as when Laurel experiences a ghostly chill in "the arched walkway beside the Chapel." And it's interesting to see our home through the eyes of a West Coast transplant (Sokoloff is a screenwriter who divides her time between California and North Carolina); the unnatural feel of so many trees ("she sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth" and "surreally empty streets") that leave her feeling "as if she'd woken up in some postapocalyptic movie in which all the people on Earth had been vaporized."
This is Sokoloff's third book. Her first, "The Harrowing," set in a college dorm where several students are staying over Thanksgiving break, showed her cinematic influences with a very visual storytelling style and a brisk pace. The second, "the Price," involved a deal with the devil to save a child's life.
It's a solid formula: classic scary-story plots, updated and kept moving with strong visuals and more dialogue than exposition. Sokoloff has found a groove and has quickly become one of the names I'm glad to see among the new arrivals.
Alexandra Sokoloff says the idea for "The Unseen" came to her when she learned that 700 boxes of files from Duke University's Rhine parapsychology lab had been opened to the public.
The same discovery propels Laurel MacDonald, the heroine of "The Unseen," into a field experiment re-creating a (fictional) Rhine poltergeist study.
Laurel and a handsome colleague break out the old ESP cards and sign up students for testing. The two high scorers and the two professors, plus a small fortune in high-tech ghost-hunting equipment, move into the same house where a similar group held a shadowy experiment nearly 45 years earlier.
Laurel discovers after the experiment starts that everyone involved in the earlier one either died or went insane -- including her own uncle, whose lingering psychic attachment to the house becomes clear from his visits to her dreams.
The fictional "Folger House" provides another delightful North Carolina connection: It's based on the mansion in Southern Pines that houses the Weymouth Center , which among its many attractions offers a writer's retreat. Sokoloff spent a week there with several fellow writers to soak up the atmosphere. She faithfully reproduces the floor plan and many furnishings but concocts a lurid family history for the "Folger House" to account for its extreme paranormal activity.
Besides the dreams, there are classic poltergeist manifestations: a rain of rocks, pounding noises in the walls, paintings turned upside down while a room is empty. And what would a haunted house story be without a cracking good séance?
There's also plenty of sexual tension in "The Unseen," as everyone staying in the house is young, good-looking and brimming with hormones.
Anyone familiar with Duke will enjoy the campus backdrop, as when Laurel experiences a ghostly chill in "the arched walkway beside the Chapel." And it's interesting to see our home through the eyes of a West Coast transplant (Sokoloff is a screenwriter who divides her time between California and North Carolina); the unnatural feel of so many trees ("she sometimes felt as if she had been dropped into an enormous hedge labyrinth" and "surreally empty streets") that leave her feeling "as if she'd woken up in some postapocalyptic movie in which all the people on Earth had been vaporized."
This is Sokoloff's third book. Her first, "The Harrowing," set in a college dorm where several students are staying over Thanksgiving break, showed her cinematic influences with a very visual storytelling style and a brisk pace. The second, "the Price," involved a deal with the devil to save a child's life.
It's a solid formula: classic scary-story plots, updated and kept moving with strong visuals and more dialogue than exposition. Sokoloff has found a groove and has quickly become one of the names I'm glad to see among the new arrivals.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
"Do Ghosts Have ESP? Why Psi Is Necessary to Models of Apparitions, Hauntings & Poltergeists"
Loyd Auerbach, MS
90 minute telephone seminar
($20)
June 22nd, 2009,
at 7:30 Eastern and at 7:30 Pacific
90 minute telephone seminar
($20)
June 22nd, 2009,
at 7:30 Eastern and at 7:30 Pacific
Psychic abilities are part of all models of apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists, whether one puts those abilities with the witnesses or with the ghosts. How do ESP and PK (psychokinesis, or mind over matter) actually figure in to ghost encounters, haunted houses and poltergeist cases? How did such models come about and why do so many parapsychologists stick to them so strongly?
Psychic abilities are part of all models of apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists, whether one puts those abilities with the witnesses or with the ghosts. How does ESP and PK (psychokinesis, or mind over matter) actually figure in to ghost encounters, haunted houses and poltergeist cases? How did such models come about and why do parapsychologists stick to them so strongly?
These and other questions will be addressed as Loyd Auerbach discusses the relationship between psi experiences and abilities to the more ghostly phenomena, and why the connection is so important to the phenomena. These models should be understood and considered by any who have such experiences or who investigate them, whether one accepts them or not.
If time permits, there will also be some discussion of the parapsychological view of demons, angels and other similar non-human entities.
For more information: http://www.mindreader.com/events.htm
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