Rhine Blog

Discovery | Through the Wormhole -- S02E05 - Is there a Sixth Sense ?

2012-01-21T18:54:00.001-08:00

William Roll

2012-01-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on January 10th we heard of the passing of our dear friend Bill Roll, a long-time member of the Rhine Center Advisory Board. Bill was a true giant in the halls of parapsychological investigators and for decades until his death was the undisputed leader and expert on the field investigation of hauntings and poltergeists. I first met Bill back in the 1950's at the Duke Parapsychology Lab when we were both young staff members and occasionally enjoyed classy dinners at the classy house that he and his first wife built on the edge of Durham. He went on to various positions and accomplishments best described in the write-up below from our website but he always remained close friends of my father JB Rhine and the Rhine Center as it is known today.

In his last appearance here several years ago Bill was our invited guest at a PRF reunion we assembled in his honor where he delivered his typical speech combining equal parts humor and wisdom. About 30 of his earlier PRF colleagues were able to attend, three of whom (Pamela St. John, Debi Pratt and Steve Barrell) have continued on as active volunteers in the Rhine community. We remember him with great fondness for his passionate interest and many contributions to the field of parapsychology and for his many human qualities that made him especially endearing.

Sally Rhine Feather
Executive Director Emeritus
Rhine Research Center

Dr. William Roll

Dr. William Roll obtained a BA from the University of Berkeley, a B.Litt. and M. Litt. from Oxford University (under Prof. H.H. Price) and a Ph.D. from Lund University (under Prof. Martin Johnson) with a thesis on the examination of the parapsychological findings suggestive of the survival of human personality after death. Dr. Roll then worked with Dr. J.B.Rhine at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory for a 7-year-period during which time he made his first poltergeist investigation. In 1961 Dr. Rhine appointed Dr. Roll project director of the Psychical Research Foundation which was set up to explore the question of survival after death. After the dissolution of the Duke Lab in 1964, The PRF became a sponsored program at the Duke Department of Electrical Engineering, expanded the staff, and participated in poltergeist research, now termed RSPK for recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis. The best-known PRF experiments were the OBE tests of Keith Harary and the EEG-ESP experiments with Sean Harribance, both of which had the involvement of the late Professor Bob Morris who later held the Koestler chair in parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh. In 1986, Dr. Roll was appointed Professor of Psychology and Psychical Research at what is now West Georgia University. He has retired from teaching but continues to write and do research as a member of the faculty. Dr. Roll has written numerous papers, book chapters and four books, the most recent entitled Unleashed: Of Poltergeists and Murder; the Strange Story of Tina Resch (with Valerie Storey). He has received the Outstanding Career Award from the Parapsychological Association and the Tim Dinsdale Memorial Award from the Society for Scientific Exploration.

Top Ten Myths About 2012

2012-01-05T08:14:00.000-08:00

Or why you shouldn't stop contributing to your 401k plan.
The ancient Mayan people, whose empire extended across much of Central America from late-antiquity to the 1500s, maintained a complex system of calendars -- which, oddly enough, ended with this year, 2012. This anomaly in Mayan timekeeping has caused many today to wonder whether the great calendar-makers foresaw an apocalypse in our era. The truth is more complex. Here are today's top 10 myths about 2012. Read the whole article at Huffington Post

Robert Sitler will be giving a talk on the Maya and 2012 at the Steadman Auditorium on the Duke Center for Living Campus on January 27, 2012. See website for tickets.

Mitch Horowitz serves on the Board of Directors for the Rhine Research Center and is a contributing instructor at the Rhine Education Center.

Sally Rhine on The State of Things

2011-11-11T07:27:00.000-08:00

Tonight ghosts, goblins, gremlins and all manner of imaginary monsters may knock on your door. But while Halloween is all about make believe, for some people the business of paranormal phenomenon is serious. Sally Rhine Feather is one of them. She is executive director emeritus of the Rhine Research Center in Durham. The center, founded by Feather’s father, J.B. Rhine, has been around in one form or another for 70 years. In that time, it has investigated such unexplained experiences as telepathy, clairvoyance and life after death. Host Frank Stasio talks to Feather about her work and her family’s history as researchers of the paranormal.

Durham's Home for Paranormal Activity

2011-11-07T06:13:00.000-08:00

http://dukechronicle.com/article/durham-s-home-paranormal-activity

By Ashley Mooney
October 27, 2011

Some things just cannot be explained, except perhaps through the paranormal.

Located off West Campus, the Rhine Research Center stands as testament to Duke’s historic connection to parapsychology research, which is the study of psychic phenomena like hypnosis and telepathy. Although the center is no longer associated with the University, a number of Duke graduates and professors are involved with the center’s board of directors and advisory board. Using scientific methods as the basis for their studies, Rhine researchers seek to make sense of the unexplainable. Over the years, though, the center has dealt with criticism and doubt surrounding the credibility and legitimacy of the field of parapsychology.
“We admit that we can’t explain everything,” Executive Director John Kruth said. “We are scientists. We’re trying to improve on the science as we move along, just like any science.”
The Rhine Research Center aims to educate the public about parapsychology, build community around the field and provide research based on modern engineering and technological advances, Kruth said. In addition to running a museum and library, the center offers online education classes on parapsychology, brings in speakers—including former astronauts and government officials—biweekly and holds Psychic Experiences Group meetings monthly.
“We study what is called ‘psi’ phenomenon, and psi is consistent with what was previously called extrasensory perception, or ESP,” Kruth said.
He noted that psi consists of four different phenomena—telepathy, psychokinesis or healing, precognition and clairvoyance, also called remote viewing.
Although parapsychologists focus mainly on ESP and psychokinesis studies, they also research survival cases, which are in-depth studies of individuals who have had close encounters with death, Kruth said.
“We’re talking about everything from near death experiences—people who have experiences when they’re clinically dead—to reincarnation research,” Kruth said. “This is also where spirits, haunting and ghosts fit in.”

A pioneer in the paranormal
Parapsychology has a long history with Duke.
Following Stanford University, Duke became the first major institution to study the field in an academic setting. Three years after the University was established, founding scientists Joseph and Louisa Rhine joined William McDougall to research psychical studies. At the time, psychical research primarily questioned the existence of an afterlife and relied heavily on spirits and mediums. The Rhines and McDougall took a more quantitative approach, using special cards and dice machines and soliciting undergraduate students to be test subjects for experiments.
“In a sense they functioned pretty much as normal scientists,” said Seymour Mauskopf, professor emeritus of the history department and member of the Rhine Research Center advisory board.
In the 1930s, the center—then called the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory—was established to support the budding science of parapsychology. Joseph Rhine also created the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke and the Journal of Parapsychology. Still, the field of study remained contentious.

“By the time I came to Duke, which was in the mid-1960s, there were people who felt that Duke was being given a bad name by the association of parapsychology,” Mauskopf said, adding that he is unsure whether the laboratory’s reputation played a role in its disassociation from Duke.
When Rhine retired in 1965, parapsychology studies became disassociated from the University through a mutual agreement. The new independent institution became known as the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man.
Some of the center’s largest successes include the creation of ESP cards, which were used in place of decks of cards in telepathy and precognition experiments, Kruth said. The experiments today, however, are conducted with computers or physical targets.

Situated in science
Several experiments are currently underway at the center.
Using a light lab—a darkroom with low intensity light detectors for infrared and ultraviolet light—Kruth said Rhine researchers measure the energy emitted from healers and long-term meditation practitioners.
“Normally most people would go in this room, and our gauges register pretty much a flat line,” he said. “But when we put someone who is a healer in there… you get huge spikes and huge light emissions... indicating a release of energy.”
Kruth added that as far as he knows, the light lab is the only experiment of its type where researchers are using electrical engineering technology to detect human energy.
Another experiment relates to electronic voice phenomena, which are recordings of voice or voice-like sounds that are not decipherable to the human ear. When the recordings are played back, some believe they can hear phrases of words. In the experiment, Rhine researchers have participants listen to 12 recordings and note what they think they are hearing, Kruth said.
John Palmer, editor of the Journal of Parapsychology and a member of the Rhine Center’s board of directors, studies motor automatism—during which bodily functions or movements occur without being consciously controlled. Palmer cited Ouija boards as an example.
“[In the experiment,] we set up an analog of an Ouija board,” Palmer said. “Basically the person moves a pen around a grid… and has to stop at the location on the grid where their hand is, telling them that [a] randomly selected target is located.”
Palmer added that in order to surpass the limitations of a conscious, rational mind, he tells participants to clear their minds, as they would do in meditation, or Palmer distracts participants by making them read quotations on a screen while doing the test.
The Ouija board experiment is not meant to conjure spirits but rather is a scientific analysis, Palmer added.

Building a community
The Rhine Research Center also serves as a hub for people who believe in the paranormal.
Kruth said the center catalogues personal accounts of people who have experienced paranormal activity via a submission form on the center’s website. Although the accounts are not used as evidence for paranormal events, they are collected and classified at the center, he said.
In addition, the monthly Psychic Experiences Group meetings give people who experience psychic phenomena at chance to share in an open, judgment-free forum, events coordinator Susan Freeman said.
“We’ve had people that have experiences that they don’t understand, and it frightens them,” Freeman said. “Somehow when they find out that there are other people who have actually had these experiences and feelings, it helps them gain a better perspective.”
Want to hear more about the paranormal?

After the Bell Tolls, Then What? ---The Amazing Saga of Dr Eben Alexander III

2011-10-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

The question of what happens to us at the time of bodily death has been widely debated by theologians, philosophers, and scientists throughout the ages. While some hold that we have a soul or a spirit that survives, others have a more mechanistic view. They believe that our consciousness is simply the result of brain function, the firing of neurons. Thus, when the brain dies, that is the end of us. But, in truth, this is all hypothetical. No one really knows---or do they? Dr. Eben Alexander thinks he has the answer.

Dr Alexander is a seasoned neurosurgeon who was trained at Duke and Harvard. In spite of a religious upbringing, his scientific background coupled with his life experiences, had led to him to be a religious nonbeliever. He had no expectation of an afterlife. And then something happened that dramatically changed all that. Dr. Alexander had a near death experience!

He woke up one morning several years ago with a debilitating headache and backache. Within a short period of time he was in a coma, suffering from a rare strain of bacterial meningitis. In the hospital, his doctors were not hopeful regarding his chances of survival, much less recovery. He remained in that coma for seven days, hovering between life and death. And then, remarkably, he woke up, dazed and confused, but with vivid memories of what had occurred while in the comatose state. Amazingly he suffered no neurological damage whatsoever. As he pondered all that he remembered and the fact that he had emerged unscathed, he attempted to find scientific reasons to explain it all. Could he have had hallucinations as a result of the disease? Was the lack of adequate blood flow, and thus lack of sufficient oxygen to his brain an explanation? In the end, he had to abandon looking to science for answers, and accepted the conclusion that he couldn't at first believe. His consciousness had left his body!

Last month, I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Alexander when he was here as one of the keynote speakers at the IANDS yearly conference.(International Association for Near Death Studies) Although I had seen him make a short appearance on "Through the Wormhole" on the SCI channel, I knew little about him and had no idea what to expect. When I encountered him in person, the presentation I had seen on TV paled in comparison to the dynamic, personable individual that I met. Eben Alexander is excited about what happened to him. He is enthusiastic to get his message out. And that message is emphatically, "There is an afterlife. I know. I've been there!"
When he spoke at the conference, he had all who attended hanging on to his every word. Most were brought to tears by his narrative. Even the strongest skeptics had to be left with some doubt! I'm not going to give away the details of his story because Dr Alexander will be a guest of the Rhine this Friday night, Oct 7th, at the Stedman Auditorium. So if possible, anyone who can, should hear this in person. If not, he is in the process of writing a book which will reveal all. I will only remark again that he is convinced that there is life after death, that he experienced it, and that it is good!

The survival question is not often addressed at the Rhine, not because we don't find it of interest or importance. In fact, J.B. Rhine considered it to be the tacit issue that underlied much of his research. He recognized though that life after death did not lend itself well to the scientific method! The possibility of nonlocal consciousness, however, is often cited as a reasonable explanation for the paranormal phenomena that we do research. While, at this point, we can demonstrate that certain PSI events do occur, the underlying mechanism by which they occur, remains a mystery.
So, what really does happen when we die? Is, in fact, the mind separate from the body, having it's own eternal existence? For some, Eben Alexander's account of his journey into another dimension, in spite of a nonfunctional brain, will just give further credence to their already held belief that an afterlife is a reality. For others, skepticism will remain, or perhaps there will be absolute disbelief. However, as difficult as it may be to fully grasp this concept, sooner or later, each and every one of us are inevitably going to find out! Until then, we will probably just have to wonder!

-- Cynthia Nigro Ph.D.

The PSI of Solving Crimes

2011-09-27T13:33:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, one of the world's most well known psychic detectives was a guest speaker at the Stedman Auditorium. Noreen Renier started out years ago as a single mother working in public relations and advertising, with no interest in the paranormal. She was totally unaware that she might have any special abilities. And then, quite unexpectedly, one night while visiting friends, she claims that she "connected" with one of their deceased grandmothers!

This was the remarkable beginning to her unconventional career as a psychic! And although there are not an abundance of real world applications for work in this area (not yet,anyway!) Noreen began working with law inforcement helping them to solve crimes. By her report, she has now been involved in more than four hundred cases in the United States and six foreign countries. She has been featured in numerous television programs, and has authored two books.

In person, Noreen appears to be about as open and down to earth as a person can be. She says she is as astonished by the dimension of her capabilities as are the clients who utilize her services. While apparently she has located missing persons, and led police and FBI agents to criminals they were seeking, she admits that, left to her own devices, she can hardly find her way around the supermarket!

In her talk, Noreen intrigued the audience when she presented cases and discussed various aspects of her work. While she omitted many of the more graphic and disturbing details, it is clear that what she does is quite serious and involves situations that fortunately most of us will never have to deal with. These include murder, abduction, tragic accidents, and mysterious disappearances.

The method she uses to obtain her knowledge is known as Psychometry. This involves her holding an object, such as a piece of jewelry, or an article of clothing , belonging to someone and accessing information. For reasons we don't entirely understand, these revelations come to her through visions or impressions. While this is happening, she often goes into a trance state, and when finished, often has no recollection of what she said.

While there are a known number of people who appear to have this gift---of being what is called a psychometrist----Noreen feels that anyone is capable of it. When recounting her first experiences, which as stated, were quite a shock to her, she then made an effort to develop her skills by learning different techniques, and ongoing practice.

Now, in addition to her forensic work, Noreen gives courses and workshops to help others develop their own psychic abilities. It is her belief that one's sixth sense can be trained ,just as any of the other five senses, to evolve to greater levels of mastery. She recounts that her students have been able to produce amazing results.

As with all areas of PSI, the underlying mechanisms of psychometry, need to be subjected to much more scientific research. At the Rhine, we are planning to commence controlled studies with many gifted individuals to assess their abilities. We hope that in doing so, we might not only illuminate the mysterious capabilities of the mind, but also put an end to the ongoing controversies in the scientific world with regard to the paranormal.
-- Cynthia Nigro, Ph.D.

REALITY AND THE EXTENDED MIND Part 1

2011-09-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

A Letter From Hubert E. Pearce

2011-09-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Here below is an excerpt from a letter to my father JB Rhine from Rev. Hubert Pearce written in 1956 on Pearce's stationery as Minister of First Methodist Church in Wynne, Arkansas. I stumbled across this letter by accident when searching in the Duke Special Collections Library for JB's correspondence with Norman Vincent Peale, a well-known religious figure of bygone days with whom JB corresponded. (In fact Peale prints a fascinating article about JB's work and it's importance for religion in his Guidepost publication in 1958).

Background: Hubert E. Pearce was the one of most outstanding high-scoring subjects of the early 1930's Duke card-calling tests, particularly important for his role as subject in the Pearce-Pratt experimental series that is generally considered the definitive experiment for ESP in those early days in terms of tight conditions conducted with two experimenters at a distance across the Duke University campus. Hubert also correctly guessed 25 cards correct in an informal test that JB conducted with him after a challenge to test his ability.

But in 9/27/56 my father receives this message from Hubert that refers back to the Pearce-Pratt work of 20 years earlier, as follows,

"Just before we moved into our new church in Bentonville, I received a letter from a Martin Gardner in New York who was evidently writing a critique of Parapsychology. My office was moved into the new building while I was out of the city and the letter was lost. When I returned from our trip (in which he visited JB in North Carolina), I had another letter in which he asked if it hadn't been long enough that my conscience was bothering me to where I was ready to confess that the work there was not well controlled etc. etc. I am enclosing my reply to him."----Hubert E. Pearce

Hubert's reply to Martin Gardner reads as follows:

Dear Mr. Gardner:

Upon my return from a trip to Durham and Washington I found your interesting letter. I will have to admit that it is a new approach and I wish that I might have had it to send to Dr. Rhine. Of course, you realize that it isn't deserving of a respectable reply. There are a lot of things that might be said to express my opinion of it--and probably of you.

May I say simply that I am as much interested in the project now as I was when I was in the University and the longer I live the more I become convinced of its reality.

Those of us who have worked with Dr. Rhine have never once doubted his ability as a scientist and research director, his devotion to the Truth, his brilliance, or his integrity.
You are simply beating again the path that was beat by Experts in the 1930's.

The day will come when Dr. Rhine's name will be among the Immortals -- and the name of his critics forgotten.

Sincerely,
Hubert E. Pearce.

-- submitted by Sally Rhine Feather

August Remote Viewing News

2011-08-25T08:27:00.000-07:00

August's Remote Viewing group meeting was unusually amazing. One of the things that fascinates me is how, despite years of "unbelievable" experiences in my work with the Rhine Research Center, I continue to be surprised when something unexpected occurs. You'd think I'd get used to it, but fortunately I don't, I still get impressed. Last night was one of those events.

At our monthly meetings we try to mix it up and experience the many facets of the Remote Viewing experience. We do this by trying out various modes of intuitive information gatherings such as dowsing, or we practice different flavors of RV such as ERV, WRV, CRV, etc. We also try different data gathering scenarios with outbounder targets, picture targets, experiential targets, multiple sensory targets, things like that. In other words, each RV group meeting is a new experience and never boring, always educational and fun. So last evening we decided to try again some Remote Viewing and analysis of our sessions.

Analyzing information from viewers is a whole different kettle of fish from gathering the data, but it is just as essential, and some would argue much more important to the RV process than the raw data. In doing the analysis of the information, it provides viewers with a new and useful perspective on the quality and value of the data they gather as remote viewers. I also wanted us to have the chance to quantify our sessions, to be able to say "This data applies to that tasking", so we did sessions that did just that.

We divided ourselves into groups of 3 members, and gave each of our groups a name. Before the meeting I had put together some target sets, 4 envelopes per set with a photograph inside each envelope. In each group of envelopes there would be one chosen as the tasked envelope. I did not look at the photos in the envelopes, I just randomly chose them from a box full of envelopes before the meeting. I asked each group, while holding up their set of envelopes, to describe on paper the photograph/event depicted in the target envelope. Again, each group gets its own set of 4 randomly chosen, unknown to any of us, envelopes. One of those envelopes is the tasked target for them to Remote View. They do not get to touch the envelopes until AFTER the sessions and analysis and feedback are provided. They go off, each group to a separate room to do their RV session however they see fit to do that. I hang back with the sets of envelopes, and while they are silently doing their sessions, I flip a coin twice to chose the one envelope from the set of four. Two coin flips provides 4 possible options. I then write down the envelope number for each set and put that piece of paper in my notebook where it won't be seen. Then the groups come back at a certain time and I give the pack of envelopes, still closed up, and the paperwork of the viewers sessions for that target, to a different group for analysis. What I ask them to do is to open the envelopes and lay the photos out on a table, then take the writing and drawings done by the viewers and rank each of the 4 photos from closest match to the data to least match to the photo. So each group analyzes another group's work, deciding which of the potential targets is most accurately described by the remote viewing session data. They write down their ranking of most described (#1) to least described (#4) and we all get back together. Then I shuffle the now closed envelopes in each set, and pull out the envelope that was the tasked target for each set, and I compare that number with the ranking numbers the analysis groups provided. Of the 3 groups of viewers, we had 2 #1's and 1 #2. In other words, two of the groups hit the nail on the head, and the other group was off by one. We did this same type of viewing/analysis/ranking many months ago and did not have such stunning results. This time was different, their success surprised me. This was not a controlled experiment, but you have to be impressed with their work.

What "caused" the group to do so well? Was it my exciting and informative Powerpoint presentation at the beginning of the meeting discussing the Remote Viewing experience? Probably not.... Was it our review of the many different CRV courses/process that have evolved since the Government RV program was declassified? Doubtful. I think a lot has to do with the group dynamic that has been evolving over the many meetings, where we are getting to know and trust and rely on each other as we share our experiences and our knowledge. Its an environment that is as laid-back as it is serious about what we are up to, whether or not we had success in our RV sessions, we still had a valuable time at the meeting for a dozen other reasons. If this is something you want to participate in, I hope you will join us at the next meeting on September 21st. If you want to be on the Remote Viewing mailing list, drop me a line a benton@rhine.org. I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope to see you at our next get-together.
-- Benton Bogle

BELIEVING IMPOSSIBLE THINGS BEFORE BREAKFAST (OR ANYTIME!)

2011-07-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

By Cynthia Nigro, PhD

Daryl Bem likes to use quotes from Lewis Carroll’s, Through The Looking Glass. One of his favorites which is said to Alice by the White Queen is this, “….sometimes, I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” So, does Daryl Bem believe impossible things himself? Well, a large part of the scientific community thinks he does.

In March, Dr. Bem rocked the scientific world, when he published an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most renowned and respected journals in the field, entitled, FEELING THE FUTURE: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FOR THE ANOMOLOUS RETROACTIVE INFLUENCES ON COGNITION AND AFFECT. What was so unusual about this paper was that it indicated evidence for the existence of PSI, a topic which was never considered valid in a mainstream journal before. Why? Because the term PSI is now used to describe that which is paranormal, and to the mainstream, that means irrational, and unbelievable In Dr. Bem’s words, “ PSI denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.”

Bem conducted a series of experiments in which he asked students to choose between two curtains presented on a computer screen. Behind one, was a picture, behind the other, a blank wall. They were asked which one they thought hid the picture. Findings were that the students were able to pick the one with the photo behind it with a frequency statistically greater than chance. And, that frequency increased if the picture was pornographic!

Next, he had students look at some words, and then asked them to write down any they remembered. After that, he had them more deliberately study half the words. His findings indicated that the students better “remembered” the words they had studied after the test. That’s right---not a misprint!!! They remembered the words better that they had studied AFTER the test! And this was also statistically significant.

The overall reaction to these findings was one of disbelief, and created a global debate on how these “impossible” results" could have occurred. In fact, the criticisms and scrutinizing began even before the article was actually published. When the results of Bem’s studies first leaked out in 2010, the internet began buzzing with discussions and hypotheses of what he “must’” have done wrong.

The world could hardly attack Dr. Bem himself. His reputation as a researcher was lengthy, stellar, and impeccable. So, they began to find fault with his methods, his statistical analyses, and anything else they could think of. Several replications were begun. Different statistical methods were applied. There seemed to be a frantic rush to somehow demonstrate that this couldn’t be so.
The media picked up on all of this, which resulted in magazine and newspaper articles being written, including one in the New York Times, and prompted interviews with Dr. Bem on television and radio, including his much discussed appearance on the Colbert Report.
As Dr. Larry Dossey expressed in his journal article by the same name, WHY ARE SCIENTISTS AFRAID OF DARYL BEM? Why are these findings creating such a fuss? Unfortunately, it seems PSI has no credibility in the world of science. IF it did, many of the underlying assumptions by which we live, and which scientists hold to be immutable truths, would have to be modified. (And, of course, some great egos would have to admit that they were wrong!!)
This is not the first time in history that someone has had the audacity to question the supposed truths of a scientific community. Remember, it was once accepted that the earth was the center of the universe! Enter Galileo-----and that poor man ended up accused of heresy, and under lifetime arrest, for daring to propose the ludicrous and “impossible to believe” idea that the earth revolved around the sun. Alas, it was later determined that he was right, and the concept was incorporated into a new world view.
On Friday, July 7th, the person behind all this present controversy, Daryl Bem, was our guest at the Rhine. (I had seen him only the night before on the Science Network in a prerecorded episode of Through the Wormhole). He gave a private presentation to our research team, and then later, gave a public presentation at the Steadman Auditorium.
Daryl Bem is a down to earth, unassuming, extremely likable individual. He is obviously brilliant, and communicates what he knows with ease. After listening to him, one is amazed by the amount of knowledge he has imparted in such a short amount of time. He intersperses his dialogue with humorous comments, personal quips, and interesting tidbits of related information.
We at the Rhine Center have no problem accepting the credibility of Bem’s findings. We deal with issues that are considered by many as “unbelievable” and “impossible” every day. For us, his research is just a natural extension of the work begun by J.B. Rhine in the Duke Parapsychology Lab so many years ago. We applaud him for having the courage to pursue this line of inquiry. We hope his work will become the first crack in the rigid tenets of modern science, and may even lead to a serious fracture!!!
Of course, we don’t expect this to happen overnight, and the debate will rage on. The implications of all of this are as yet unclear, but it’s a start. So, we don’t suggest that college students now begin studying for their exams after they’ve taken them!!! We do however suggest that orthodox scientists begin studying findings such as these, and re-evaluating their concept of what is indisputably not possible. In the end, they might just find that embracing the idea of “believing in impossible things” is the ultimate triumph after all!
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Daryl Bem is a social psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.

Links:

Daryl Bem’s Home Page
Appearance on the Colbert Report
Article in the New York Times
Harvard Debate with Daryl Bem

DEBATING PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE: HUMAN POTENTIAL OR HUMAN ILLUSION?

2011-07-12T10:06:00.000-07:00

From the upcoming Journal of Parapsychology:

DEBATING PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE: HUMAN POTENTIAL OR HUMAN ILLUSION? edited by Stanley Krippner and Harris L. Friedman. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. $44.95 (hardback). Pp. 236. ISBN 978-0-31339-261-0

Whatever your prior view of the debate over psi, this book is an absolute requirement if you wish to be kept updated. The current status of differing views on scientific arguments for and against the existence of psychic phenomena is debated in this volume. The only risk is that it is easy to choose whom to believe and thereby find your own personal biases confirmed. On the other hand, should you be open-minded and hoping for a resolution, you may at first be disappointed with the stagnation. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the seeds for synthesis are actually there, although hard to find. Debates are actually not the best way of encouraging progress in a controversial subject. Inevitably, even without our biases, it is the most persuasive and eloquent debaters who are deemed the winners, whereas in this case the only winner should be science. It becomes then this reviewer’s difficult task to try to bring fairness back to the forefront, but ultimately in a case like this impartiality is an ambitious goal. Even so, I prefer to think that I share the attitude of most serious researchers in this area: If I am being fooled, I want the critic to tell me how.

The book contains chapters written by some of the most vocal experts in this field. Dean Radin and Chris Carter are the proponents presenting the case for psi having now been established, while the critics Ray Hyman, Jim Alcock, and Christopher French take the opposing view. I am going to allow my own bias to immediately discount the chapter by Michael Shermer, the editor of The Skeptic, on the grounds that it is not science; rather, it is based mainly on his personal experiences with tarot readings, accompanied by tales provided to him by the maverick English journalist Jon Ronsson (producer of the film The Men Who Stare at Goats). The chapter does fulfill a function—as a shop-window example of what the proponents in the book complain about: arrogance, in this case assuming psychical researchers know nothing about cold reading.

I shall not attempt a summary and evaluation of each chapter, because this is more than adequately provided by the editors in the form of their own introduction. Instead, I will look at the main issues per se. Harvard psychiatrist Ruth Richards provides a fair-minded introduction to the topic, after which the major contributors present their cases. The contributors then all come back for round two, rebuttals in which they evaluate their opponents’ chapters. Finally, epilogues are provided by the critic Richard Wiseman, the proponent Stephan Schwartz, and the editors themselves.

The confrontation gets heated and personal at times. Frustrated at the lack of appreciation for the enormous effort they expend to fulfill the critic’s demands with the limited support available, the proponents begin to see the critics as outmoded die-hard believers in materialism. They are seen as being left behind by recent developments in quantum physics and consciousness studies. Consequently, several of the proponents label the critics now as “psi deniers,” in much the same class as consciousness deniers and climate change deniers. Whatever one thinks about this labeling, it needs to be said that while much has been written on the psychology of belief in the paranormal, very little is known about the opposing polarized disbelief. Even if it causes some offence, it is therefore of value that Carter contributes a section of his chapter under the rubric Psychology of the Dogmatic Critic (p. 96).

And offence it does cause. Hyman claims he has always, in his role as a member of the Committee for Scientific Inquiry and through his papers in the Skeptical Inquirer, made a distinction between his treatment of parapsychology and other paranormal claims, recognizing that the former are based on scientific procedures. He is clearly offended by the allegations of unfair treatment made particularly by Carter and Schwartz. Likewise, Alcock recoils against this treatment as “ad hominem attacks” and “reviling the messenger.”

To read the whole article you can download a PDF, or subscribe to the Journal of Parapsychology.

A Modern Cultural Perspective on Spiritual Healing

2011-07-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

“Best-selling author and self-help guru James Ray was convicted last month of negligent homicide in the 2009 deaths of three people at a ceremony he led in an Arizona sweat lodge. His conviction raises enduring questions about how far society should go in monitoring therapeutic spiritual activities, particularly when matters of health and safety are at stake.” – Mitch Horowitz, The Wall Street Journal

Mitch Horowitz, author and friend of the Rhine Research Center, examines the impact of this conviction and the history of the societal attitudes towards spiritual healing. Included is a link to an article published in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, July 8th, 2011.

Online Article

Summer 2011 edition of the Rhine Research Center’s quarterly newsletter

2011-06-27T16:54:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

We are proud to bring you the summer, 2011 edition of the Rhine Research Center’s quarterly newsletter.

In this newsletter, we have a feature article by Lee Pantas, “The Synchronicity of the Two Octopuses,” illuminating the often overlooked connection between art and precognition. Most people understand easily how dreaming and states of reverie are often conducive to precognitive hits; it is therefore no surprise to realize that the right-brained, timeless state one enters during the process of creating art might lead to precognitive productions, often unbeknownst to the artist! See for yourself.

Congratulations to our Senior Research Fellow, Christine Simmonds-Moore, and her husband Steve Moore on the June 7th birth of their son, Leif Athan Rhane Simmonds-Moore!

We also have our regular “Psi Chronicles” column, by executive director Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D., outlining a case of macro-PK or psychokinesis; we have an article discussing the well-known “decline effect” in science and how parapsychology might shed light on something that mystifies scientists in other fields; and we have reviews of a parapsychology documentary, an iphone app for practicing your psychic ability, and a book by William Bengston, Ph.D., arguably the most innovative and reliable voice in the field of energy healing today.

Additionally, the last page of the newsletter for a summary of the upcoming events at the Rhine. We have so many well-known, interesting speakers coming in the next few months; I would hate for you to miss out!

Enjoy!

- Jennifer Moore, editor

Could It Be? Spooky Experiments That 'See' The Future

2011-06-21T17:11:00.001-07:00

by Robert Krulwich
Later today you are going to do something, something you don't know about yet.
Yet somehow, it's already happened. Somehow, it's already affected you.

Huh?

One of the most respected, senior and widely published professors of psychology, Daryl Bem of Cornell, has just published an article that suggests that people — ordinary people — can be altered by experiences they haven't had yet. Time, he suggests, is leaking. The Future has slipped, unannounced, into the Present. And he thinks he can prove it. Read More

Dowsing and Remote Viewing

2011-06-21T17:08:00.000-07:00

Dowsing and Remote Viewing are close cousins, many of the former government RVers are dowsers, too, and many of the techniques and skills used in dowsing can be applied to Remote Viewing. So its natural that the Remote Viewing group decided to look into this dowsing phenomenon to see what we could learn. A couple of the members of the group prepared and presented us all information on the history, skills and application of dowsing at the most recent RV meeting. We just scratched the surface of all that we could learn about this ancient skill, but it was surely enough to whet our appetites to learn more.

Like other practices that are working with intuition and “non-conscious” information, dowsing requires a lot of practice and experience to become a useful tool. We were interested in learning more about dowsing because it is so similar to Remote Viewing, and can be applied to Remote Viewing. Discussing dowsing also was a great stepping off point for lots of valuable discussion within the group on the nuances of working with intuitive information. As usual, it was the shared insight on experiences and practices that made our meeting worthwhile for those of us there. We discussed pendulum dowsing as well as the use of dowsing rods. We were able to practice this skill, and many of the techniques required were presented.

My point here is to encourage you to come join our monthly Remote Viewing group, it’s a place to learn about the how-to and the experiential parts of the practice you just are not going to get off the internet or on your own. Over the years, I learned a ton of information from reading and gleaning what I could off the internet, and I attended lectures and workshops on Remote Viewing. But having a regular get-together with folks you can rely on, who know what you are talking about but also have read and experienced other things that you can learn from, makes a world of difference. I am regularly impressed with new information and ideas that I did not know was out there, and I come away from each meeting better informed, energized to try new things, and with another addition to that growing pile of “must read” books. Most folks in the group come from other interests, and want to learn about Remote Viewing to add another tool to their toolbox. I encourage you to do the same, and we look forward to seeing you at the next meeting on July 20th.
-- Benton Bogle

A New Look at Some Old Stones

2011-06-07T04:47:00.000-07:00

Just as things had begun to quiet down at the Rhine, we got a new jolt of energy with the advent of Paul and Charla Devereux. Paul was our featured speaker and presenter on Friday the 20th of May, and Saturday, the 21st of May. He is world renowned for his work in investigating ancient sacred sites, archaeoacoustics, ancient cultures, and altered states of consciousness.

Although he started out in life as a painter with a degree in Fine Art, his interests soon expanded, and he is now the author of innumerable books, as well as journal and magazine articles. He makes presentations around the globe, and speaks on television and radio. His achievements also include being founding co- editor of the Journal, TIME AND MIND, a Senior Research Fellow at the International Consciousness Research Laboratory at Princeton, and a Research Affiliate at the Royal College of Art.

Charla Devereux accompanied her husband on his visit and is accomplished in her own right. She is the Network Manager of the Scientific and Medical Network, as well as having written several books on alternative medicine. She is an authority on Aromatherapy, and was instrumental in having that subject taught as a serious college level course in the United States. Most recently, she and Paul have co-authored a book on Lucid Dreaming.

Over the course of the weekend, Paul took us on an odyssey through time and space. He intrigued us with slides of various geological sites, where magnificent pieces of the earth were restructured or decorated by ancient man. These were deemed as sacred spaces for connecting with the mythic Great Time.

These ancient cultures had a very different vision of the world than that of modern man. They saw the earth as a living system, of which they were a part. They viewed all things as being possessed of a spirit to be honored and respected. Nature was not to be exploited or abused, but used as a gift that could unveil the great mysteries of life.

Also, their concept of consciousness and reality was quite different. Hallucinatory drugs were not taken for hedonistic pleasure or material gain or power, but to obtain a higher state of being. Natural parts of the environment were also fashioned to do this. An example is found at the legendary Circle of Stonehenge where some of the stones were apparently struck repeatedly, to produce a ringing sound (archaeoacoustics!), and facilitate a trance state. (This would finally explain why these stones were moved 20 miles to be put in their present location!)

When in these altered states, what was experienced was considered to be just as real as what occurred in the natural waking state-----only better! There were no physical limitations, and time lost any meaning. The ability to spirit travel gave a more all-encompassing perspective from which to view life, incorporating other planes of existence, and the vast capabilities of consciousness.

As Paul Devereux pointed out, we may have lost something by dismissing these peoples as primitive. Perhaps they knew and understood much more than we do. Our view of ourselves has become very mechanistic. Consciousness has been reduced to the workings of the brain, just a jumble of electrical impulses producing actions. The soul or spirit has been dismissed as superstition. Any experience that falls out of the realm of consensus reality is considered to be the manifestation of mental illness. Hallucinatory drugs are illegal, and the experiences related to them are again diminished to be aberrant brain activity.

How sad that in today’s environment of advanced technology, one area that is vastly ignored is that of consciousness. Why is it that we are not even allowed to question whether there might be more? Why not at least try to find out? It is known that we only perceive a small portion of what is “out there”. Even then, for consensus, we “fill in the blanks” to make everything conform.

The goal of both Paul Devereux and the Rhine Center is to explore these other possible realms. We investigate in scientific ways, with the same scientific methods that are used universally. Still, our motives and credibility are often questioned. What might others be so afraid of? Are we possibly missing the opportunity to advance ourselves and improve our world? If we keep going the way we are, we are clearly headed for extinction. There are so many questions left to be answered.

Paul and Charla Devereux left us with a renewed sense of wonder about what we might be capable of doing or knowing, and asking ourselves questions about the very fabric of our lives. They are truly charming people, in every sense of the word. They are impressive, not only in their knowledge, but also in their integrity, and the reverence with which they treat their subject matter. We certainly look forward to having them visit again soon!!
-- Cindy Nigro

To learn much more about Paul Devereux, please visit his website at http://www.pauldevereux.co.uk/. Also visit our recent newsletter which features Paul Devereux and Sacred Sites.

Jerry Lazarus on Dreams

2011-06-05T06:17:00.000-07:00

Dreams are something we all can relate to, they are a part of all our lives. Jerry Lazarus came to the Stedman Center on Friday night and gave a fascinating and enjoyable talk about dreaming.

Drawing from his own decades of experience studying and working with dreams, and providing many examples from his recently published book "Dreams: Listening to the Voice of God", he gave all the folks there at his talk many valuable ways to work with their own dreams.

Jerry enthusiastically shared with us insights, anecdotes and practical suggestions based on his work with Edgar Cayce's trove of dreamwork, and from the great dream interpreters of the Bible's old testament. I have been fortunate to work more with my own dreams recently, and have set about to learn all I could about the topic, so I was excited to go hear Mr. Lazarus speak, and eager to hear new information on dreamwork.

Jerry had some new insights for me, that's for sure, but his emphasis on some simple things to do regarding our dreams, and his love for this topic were the real stars of his presentation. Of course he covers this most thoroughly in his book, but he wanted us to know that dreaming is about communicating, about learning and working with the central voice always available to us. If you were there at his talk, you had to be impressed by his joy for the subject, and you learned a lot. He sent us home with much to work with and an enthusiasm for new gifts our dreams may provide us.
---Benton Bogle

Michael Persinger on No More Secrets

2011-06-01T07:29:00.001-07:00

Does Time Slow Down During a Crisis?

2011-05-09T09:24:00.000-07:00

David Eagleman, an Assistant Professor of neuroscience and psychology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas recently reported on experiments of his team that showed that despite what folks commonly experience, time does not slow down during a crisis. Nor does brain processing speed up, so that time seems to slow down. What their research shows is that during a crisis, such as a NDE, often "the part of the brain called the amygdale becomes more active, and lays down extra sets of memories that go along with the actual events." So when you play the event back in your memory, you recall time slowing down, though that is not what happened.

Let’s consider another common part of a Near Death Experience, the life review. People having a NDE often report a replaying of their whole life as part of the experience. I do not want to take away from the spiritual aspect of the NDE, that is an essential part of my life. But I think a life review would be explained as a logical part of how consciousness works during a life threatening crisis, especially if we view consciousness as part of the DNA's adaptability. In an earlier blog I discussed how natural selection would need to limit PSI ability. The link is here http://rhineonline.blogspot.com/search/label/Evolutionary%20advantage.

My experiences and study of Remote Viewing, and other PSI events, has led me to believe that PSI is part of the normal processing of information that constitutes consciousness. Dr. Jim Carpenter's "First Sight" model of PSI, and Dr. Christine Hardy's exploration of Semantic Constellations both describe " pre-experiential mental processes by which the mind structures all its experiences and commences all its actions", as Dr. Carpenter notes. I noticed, as I look at the mind as an evolved tool of genes, shaped by and tailored for the process of natural selection, that we can see the process of consciousness conforming also to the process of natural selection. This process requires three things, genetic variation, inheritance, and differential fitness. Consciousness provides these three things. Your thoughts, beliefs, ideas and knowledge vary and change over time, the raw materials in your brain progress and grow. Likewise, these things remain inheritable from situation to situation you find yourself in over time, that is what memory is. But it is existence of differential fitness in mental process that shows just how great thinking is as a tool evolved over time. With mental processes, the range of adaptability is vastly increased in the individual. Also, the range of solutions to problems is beyond just conscious problem solving. Research shows that subliminally, the brain is gathering and processing information, and solutions to problems can spontaneously pop into your consciousness without conscious effort. As you experience, the vast majority of what you do is initiated and carried out without your considered effort, because your mind is processing multiple systems of information constantly, subconsciously.

But when you encounter a new situation, the brain scrambles to adapt to the novel environmental factor it needs to deal with. It does this by trying known solutions to similar events, and if that does not work, it goes into automatic, instinctual and "dis-associated" mode as it rapidly tries to find a way to process the new information. Getting back to NDEs, people who have had them commonly report they recall their minds experiencing multiple thought lines at once, like those reported by Albert Heim who recounted his own brush with death during a fall. It is also in these crisis moments that PSI events occur, as all available data from the mind is accessed to adapt to the potentially life ending event. If the material for thought and consciousness is being processed to insure survival, then could the "life review" be a memory data dump, a last chance attempt to access all the stored experiences of the individual, making it available for the conscious and especially the subconscious to use to come up with a last second save? Could the sense of "linear time" of the life review be, like the recalled experience of time slowing down during crisis, simply be the memory's way of organizing the entire life data file when it’s recalled later? Can you recall your life any other way?

Again, I am not saying that all of an NDE is just biological processes. But the life review fits right in with an understanding of how consciousness works. It is that same understanding of the mind processes that help explain where PSI fits in, and helps me understand the dynamics involved in Remote Viewing.
-- Benton Bogle

Mitch Horowitz Visits the Rhine Research Center

2011-04-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

On Friday, April 8th, the Rhine Research Center was honored to host a presentation by renowned author, publisher, and speaker, Mitch Hororitz.

Mitch’s recent book, Occult America , is highly acclaimed and received the 2010 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence. Mitch is editor-in-chief at Tarcher/Penguin in New york, His credits include innumerable speaking engagements and interviews on such programs as CBS Sunday Morning and Dateline NBC. He has written articles in several well respected newspapers and magazines including the Washington Post and U.S. News and World Report.

Earlier in the day on Friday, Mitch was interviewed by Frank Stasio on NPR in Chapel Hill. During this time, several of us at the Rhine gathered at a local restaurant where we were to meet him for lunch after he finished..

Having never seen a picture of him, I expected an austere older man, who would be rather stuffy and standoffish. So you can imagine my surprise when Mitch arrived with a bounce in his step and a boyish smile on his face. He introduced himself to all of us in an engaging and particularly unassuming manner which immediately made us all feel comfortable.

This is not to say that he is not a serious or scholarly person, but he presents his ideas in such a way that they are not only understandable but fascinating. He briefly described some of the topics that he would be covering later that evening , everything from Ouija Boards and seances, to Abraham Lincoln, the Freemason Society, and recent Supreme Court decisions to uphold various religious practices.

The lunch hour went by quickly, and I was now really looking forward to the evening program. And Mitch did not disappoint. To a large group of people, he spoke for 90 minutes, nonstop, while the crowd sat mesmerized (pun intended) by his well-researched chronicle of how occult practices sprung up in America, and had an impact not only on religion and spirituality, but also on the social conscience and political movements of the times, right up to the present.

Mitch explained that the term “occult” often has negative connotations and is assumed to be associated either with some form of devil worship or else with ridiculous superstition. His definition, however, is more specifically used to describe the many religious and spiritual groups that came about during the Renaissance and had their roots in the ancient mysteries of Greece, Rome, and Egypt.

On the lighter side, he described how his interest in the occult was first sparked when he was a young child. While at a diner with his “grown-up” family members, he said he became bored., and wandered to the front of the restaurant where there was a variety of novelty and gum machines. One of them, dispensed horoscopes in small plastic tubes which fascinated him,. In purchasing one, he discovered that his horoscope said that he would receive a letter!

Now being only nine years old, and never receiving any mail whatsoever., he was intrigued. And the next day, he did get a letter! ----- No matter that it was only from the local library telling him he had an overdue book! And so began a lifelong passion.

Occult America is a fascinating read and is so detailed that it would be impossible to outline it in these few short paragraphs, but it tells of the way these various spiritual religions sprang up and were allowed to flourish in America as they would be no where else. It describes how they wound their way into our society and had vast influence on our culture and history;. It seems that people from time immemorial have searched for meaning in their lives, and wondered if there was not something greater than themselves that they personally could connect with.

Now, as I read this book , I recognize that these colonies of people were actually the forefathers of what we are doing today at the Rhine. Of course the Rhine is in no way a religious organization, but a rigorous scientific organization. Still, we too are working to discover if there is something bigger than ourselves, be it God, some energy field, or a collective unconscious, that we can access. We work on the premise that the mind is capable of far more than was originally believed, that mind over matter is a possibility. While we now have the advantage of science and technology that those before us did not, our goal is the same, to give to all men (and women!) the ability to have a greater understanding of their capabilities, and to demystify the unknown.

Mitch’s interview at NPR can be heard at http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/Occult_America.mp3/view
Mitch Horowitz website http://www.mitchhorowitz.com/

A Weekend with Paul Smith

2011-02-22T06:15:00.001-08:00

Paul Smith is a Remote Viewing trainer, wrote the Military's RV manual, and was a central member of the Government's Remote Viewing program during its heyday.

Mr. Smith paid the Rhine Center a visit last Friday and Saturday, and if you had a chance to come hear him talk, you know he had a lot of fascinating things to say. He was a very engaging speaker, and on Friday night he talked about Remote Viewing in general and some of his adventures in the now declassified Stargate program.

On Saturday he went into detail on the theories and mechanics of Remote Viewing, and the group who attended got to practice RV with Mr. Smith as their instructor. It was fascinating and fun, and even though I haved learned a lot about remote viewing over the years, he still had some new insights to share. He really delved into the big questions remote viewing presents us with, and we had a great time discussing the hows and whys of the experience. Everyone there seemed to get a lot out of it, and we are looking forward to having him back. Do yourself a favor and check out his website http://www.rviewer.com/.

Daryl Bem: Precognition in the Mainstream Media

2011-02-02T18:22:00.001-08:00

By John G. Kruth

On Thursday, January 27, 2011, the well-respected psychologist Daryl Bem, PhD appeared on the Comedy Central program the Colbert Report to discuss a topic that has set the media ablaze and has given the world of psychology a new perspective on how to test theories that have been the subject of parapsychology for over a century. Retroactive habituation, or time travelling porn (as Stephen Colbert called it), is an example of precognition (receiving information about future events) which can be demonstrated under laboratory conditions using traditional psychological testing methods. This top notch research has been recognized by the New York Times, New Scientist, Psychology Today and ABC News, and it has been published by the respected peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

In a typical example of Dr. Bem’s (2010) experiment, 100 participants were placed in front of a computer screen where they were shown two curtains. They were told that an image would appear behind one of the curtains and asked to guess which curtain would reveal the image. When the images that were displayed were designed to evoke a significant emotional reaction from the participants (e.g. fear, disgust, joy, or eroticism) the participants showed a 53% chance of selecting the correct curtain when a positive image was shown or of avoiding the image when a negative image was shown. Though this may sound like a small variance from chance (50%), Dr. Bem notes that 53% is the same advantage that casinos have on a roulette wheel and was the same percentage of votes received by Barrack Obama in the 2008 presidential elections. His results built upon prior research that indicated that people react to significant emotional events between 2 and 10 seconds before they happen. It seems logical that even a brief precognitive knowledge of a frightening image (like that of a tiger ready to pounce) would help a human to avoid danger and would provide a significant evolutionary advantage.

Although 60% of the public believe in ESP, psychologists are typically some of the most skeptical of all scientists when it comes to parapsychology. Because of Dr. Bem’s significant contributions to social psychology, his position at Cornel University, and his use of standard psychological testing methods, many scientists are now trying to determine how to integrate this new knowledge with existing theories.

Daryl Bem is a scientist with impeccable credentials who is highly respected for his work in psychology. He was once a skeptic of psi research, and since he has skills as an illusionist, he was recruited as a skeptical consultant on ESP experiments by leading parapsychologists like Charles Honorton. Once he became familiar with the work that was being done in parapsychology and after he critically examined the research, Dr. Bem realized that there were convincing effects being produced that called for further experimentation. In other words, rather than sticking to his deep seated beliefs and rationalizing his objections, Bem followed the evidence. By upholding the most important and honorable principles of science, Bem created experiments to help expand the reach of laboratory research that has been done for over 100 years in laboratories all over the world.

The Rhine Research Center is proud to have Daryl Bem as a member of their advisory board, and has been privileged to have him speak at the center. Keep an eye out for future experiments at the RRC related to this research, and you may have the opportunity to be part of other historic discoveries in the field of parapsychology.

Suggested Reading:
Bem, D. (2010). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Retrieved February 1, 2011 from URL: http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html
The New York Times January 6, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/science/11esp.html
The New York Time Jamuary 11, 2011

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712-is-this-evidence-that-we-can-see-the-future.html
New Scientist November 2010

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201010/not-so-fast-psychic-phenomena-research
Psychology Today Octiber 21, 2010

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/extrasensory-perception-scientific-journal-esp-paper-published-cornell/story?id=12556754
ABC World News January 6, 2011

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cassandra-vieten/esp-evidence_b_795366.html
Huffington Post 12/17/2010

Time-Traveling Porn - Daryl Bem

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>

Video Archive

A New Book by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D

2011-01-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

January 2011

Welcome to the world of science and spirit...

Do spirits exist, and if so, can they play a useful if not essential role in our individual and collective lives? Are there sources of invisible information and guidance waiting to be tapped and harnessed if we are just willing to listen?
If we, in our essence, are spirits too, can we come to see this possibility when we look at ourselves in the mirror? And can we draw on this great inner potential and power with wisdom and love to change our ways accordingly, before it is too late for humankind?

I believe that science not only can address such questions, but in the process can potentially help increase our ability to receive spiritual information accurately, and we can then act upon it safely and wisely.

Praise for the work

"Gary Schwartz has been on a remarkable journey throughout his lifetime. His body of work is inspirational to me because his passion to bring science and spirit together is dominated by an empirical doctrine that is unimpeachable. His latest research as recounted in The SacredPromise is likely to impress even the most diehard skeptic. I am proud to recommend this book and to heap as much praise as possible upon my friend, Gary Schwartz.” —Kelsey Grammer

“Sacred Promise is elegant, rigorous, and groundbreaking—research science at its most innovative. Gary Schwartz’s exposition of ideas interfacing theory, paradigm, method, and anecdotes shows academia at its best.” —Dr. Lisa Miller, associate professor of psychology at Columbia University, editor of the Oxford University Press Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality, and cohost of the TV show Psychic Kids

“Gary Schwartz applies procedures of experimentation that no honest skeptic could argue with.” —Deepak Chopra, author of The Third Jesus and Life After Death

"Postmortem survival has long been a taboo topic in scientific circles. Gary Schwartz had ingenuity and a pioneering spirit to go deeply into this area and not be afraid of what he found. You’ll be fascinated by this book!” —Charles T. Tart, PhD, author of Altered States of Consciousness and The End of Materialism
“For more than two decades I have had the privilege of working with Gary Schwartz. He has amazed me not only with his insights and hard scientific approach, but also his willingness to explore and then share his findings on very controversial topics. Even if you do not believe in the premises of The Scared Promise, your intellect and heart will be teased enough so that you just might open your mind and start to believe that all this, and more, is possible.” --Jerry Cohen, CEO, Canyon Ranch

“This book is an absolute must-read for anyone who struggles with faith, love, death, and aspects of divinity.”—John Edward, author of Crossing Over and The Infinite Quest

The Sacred Promise: Science and the Role of Spirit in Healing with Gary Schwartz from Rhine Research Center on Vimeo.

Sally Rhine Feather to appear on "Twin Talk" on the World Talk Radio Network

2011-01-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

Executive Director of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, will guest on Twin Talk with Dr. Mercy on the World Talk Radio Variety channel at 8am PT on Friday, January 7, 2011.

Dr. Rhine Feather will discuss her life-long research into the paranormal and her involvement in the Rhine Center founded by her parents Joseph and Louisa Rhine in 1927 to pioneer the study of parapsychology. She co-authored The Gift: The Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People with Michael Schmicker in 2005 based upon research at the Rhine Center.

Joseph Rhine initially investigated the mind’s ability to gain psychic information by other than sensory means, known as extrasensory perception (ESP), and to perform psychokinesis (PK), the movement of objects by mental intention in cooperation with Duke University. The Journal of Parapsychology was founded in 1937 as an independent peer-reviewed professional journal to provide an outlet for reporting the findings from Duke and other laboratories at home and abroad. Now in the 21st century, the Rhine Center continues the mission and work of its founder J.B. Rhine with a broadened scope directed deeper into the Study of Consciousness.

Sally will discuss the history of the Rhine Center, research findings over 70 years, and the importance of twins in paranormal studies.

Twin Talk airs live on Fridays at 8 AM Pacific / 10 AM Central / 11 AM Eastern on the World Talk Radio Variety Channel. To access the show, log on at www.worldtalkradio.com. All shows will be available in Dr. Mercy's Content Library on the World Talk Radio Variety Channel for on-demand and podcast download.

Two Rhine Researchers Receive Bial Grants

2010-12-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

By John G. Kruth

Dr. John Palmer and Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore have received prestigious Bial grants for research projects in 2011. The Bial Foundation is an organization committed to discovering, developing, and providing therapeutic solutions within the area of health and is the world’s largest provider of grants for scientific research in Parapsychology.

Dr. Palmer is Director of Research at the RRC, Editor of the Journal of Parapsychology, has twice been the President of the Parapsychological Association, and has published over 100 research reports, literature reviews, and theoretical papers. He will be performing an experiment to evaluate the connection between the dissociative state and PSI. Psychological dissociation is a disruption of normal conscious awareness in an individual. Many people experience a mild form of dissociation while driving a car and listening to music, and musicians and artists have been known to purposely create a dissociative state in order to improve their creativity. Dr. Palmer presents a hypothesis that dissociative states can be exploited to enable better performance on PSI tasks. Through a motor automatism PSI task, exemplified by the automatic writing of the trance medium Leonore Piper as well as the modern Ouija board, Dr. Palmer will evoke a dissociative state and distract participants’ primary consciousness with a reading exercise while the dissociated consciousness performs the PSI task. The overall hypothesis to be tested in this study is that psychological dissociation improves PSI performance.

Dr. Simmonds-Moore is the Senior Research Fellow at the RRC and has been involved in research on paranormal experiences for over 10 years. She has taught courses in Parapsychology at Liverpool-Hope University and the RRC. She has numerous studies and research collaborations to her credit and has been performing research at the RRC since 2009. Her research project will examine the association between synesthesia and anomalous experiences that may include PSI. Synesthesia occurs when one sense involuntarily activates a different sensory experience. A person who experiences synesthesia may be able to see sounds, taste shapes, or hear colors. Dr. Simmonds-Moore’s study will attempt to identify individuals who experience synesthesia and explore how this relates to PSI and other experiences. Her research also examines the relationship between synesthesia, personality (a measure of positive schizotypy), and a range of anomalous and paranormal experiences. Her work will also develop a new scale to explore the incidence of synesthetic experiences in the general population.

Everyone at the RRC would like to congratulate Dr. Palmer and Dr. Simmonds-Moore on their grants and the opportunity to perform such important research under the Rhine umbrella.

Remote Viewing Group Update

2010-11-18T08:26:00.000-08:00

The monthly meeting of the Remote Viewing group occurred on Wednesday the 17th, and we covered a lot of fascinating ground.

We have started setting aside some time in every meeting to share information that others in the group might benefit from. This includes discussing books, websites, movies, online education and videos, tweets, journal articles, experiments and even personal experiences related to PSI. Frankly, this sort of sharing was happening anyway and everyone got a lot out of it, so making it a planned part of the meetings made good sense, and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

After that, I talked a little about getting PSI info related to other senses beyond the viual stuff we usually focus on, and I brought along a page of the CRV manual showing an example of CRV Stage 2 paperwork where multi-sensory data is gathered, such as smells, sounds and tactile info in addition to visual data. You can read and/or download the CRV manual.

Then we did a remote viewing session with an odor as the target. This was an unusual challenge that proved to be quite an eye opener, if you'll excuse the play on words. It forced the viewers to approach data differently, and pointed out the limitations of one's olfactory vocabulary. Amidst a bit of head scratching, we got into a discussion of how we normally put into words sensory and/or intuitive information, and what this tells us about how we use the data we get, whether it is visual or from our other senses.

We did not leave the Rhine Center with all the answers, but we did leave there with some new and important questions. No doubt, by next meeting on December 15th we WILL have all the answers, so you will want to make sure to be there. If you have any questions or comments, or want to be on the group's mailing list, drop me a line at Benton@Rhine.org. I look forward to hearing from you.

--Benton Bogle

The Psychic View

2010-11-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

Show Date: Thursday November 4th, 2010
Psychic Access Talk Radio

Don't miss this week's show, anchored by Maureen, themed "Mind Over Matter" with special guest Dr. Sally Rhine Feather, founder of the Psychic Experience Group (PEG) at the Rhine Research Center and has over 30+ years experience as a clinical psychologist in mental health and psychiatric clinics as well as private practice in North Carolina and New Jersey.

As the eldest daughter of Dr. J.B Rhine, the "father of ESP research," Dr. Feather practically grew up at the Parapsychology Lab at Duke University, where her father's famous Zener ESP cards tests with selected Duke students led to “Extrasensory Perception” becoming a popular household word in America. She and her siblings served as test subjects in the earliest child ESP experiments conducted at the Lab. As a teenager, Dr. Feather's first job was serving as her father's assistant, rechecking experimental test data. She served as a research assistant both before and after college, meeting most of the well-known parapsychologists and various visiting dignitaries who came through the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.
J B Rhine (Joseph Banks Rhine) is widely considered to be the "Father of Modern Parapsychology." Along with his wife Dr Louisa E. Rhine, Dr J B Rhine studied the phenomena now known as parapsychology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Dr. J B Rhine coined the term "extrasensory perception" (ESP) to describe the apparent ability of some people to acquire information without the use of the known (five) senses). He also adopted the term "parapsychology" to distinguish his interests from mainstream psychology. The lab became well known worldwide and served as a major training ground for researchers into extrasensory perception and psychokinesis using the quantitative experimental approach, including new testing techniques and methods of analyzing results statistically, making possible the comparison of results obtained under different laboratory conditions.

"Psychokinesis" (PK) was first studied in the early years of the Duke Parapsychology Lab when participants attempted to influence the outcome of falling dice by mental intention. Studies of PK have continued with more modern techniques at the Rhine Center and other laboratories around the world. However, except for the occasional poltergeist investigation, there has been little attention directed to PK experiences that occur spontaneously in everyday life.

The present study is designed to learn more about the broad general range of possible spontaneous PK experiences. In the current phase of this study, the focus is on those unexplained physical events that seem to occur specifically around the time of crisis, death or near-death. Typical reports collected include the falling or breaking of objects, unusual noises, unexplained behavior of animals, or the malfunctioning of electronic equipment that occur around the time of a crisis, near-death, or death of a family member or loved one. This show will bring insight based on science and above all support to individuals that have a story to tell.

Should Physicists Talk to Metaphysicists?

2010-11-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

A video interview posted at BigThink.com, and thought you might be interested in the portion on quantum physics, in which I try to articulate grounds for physicists and serious metaphysical people to be able to talk.

Watch Video

--from Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America

Mitch Horowitz will be presenting at the Rhine Center in April 2011.

What is the evolutionary advantage of PSI?

2010-10-28T14:40:00.000-07:00

It has always struck me weird that if PSI abilities are part of our brains and are biology related, then they would be exposed to the natural selection process. If that is the case, it seems like they would be SO beneficial that they would quickly spread throughout the population. But that does not seem to be the case, at least a conscious use of PSI seems to remain very elusive. I have heard lots of explanations, none very convincing. So it got me wondering…so I did some reading on the limits of natural selection. At that point I stumbled upon a related question, "What is the evolutionary advantage of mortality?" If passing on your genes is the goal, then intuitively you'd think the members of a group who could live longer would do better at that, just as a person with ESP would be expected to do much better at passing on their genes as someone without that trait. Regarding aging and mortality, gene research shows that mortality and the aging process is built into the system, it is genetically hardwired. How and why would such a thing evolve? The answer to that question is the same as for the one regarding the lack of conscious ESP traits in the species, too.

In nature, it’s a given that a population will expand to use the resources available. There is no "natural selection" pressure without limited resources. Without resource limits, the organism has more reproductive success if it simply reproduces more than the rest of the population. If that occurs, then the limits of available resources is reached as the population explodes. At that point, the adaptation to procreate unchecked is a pretty damning one and selected out. Given that it is more likely that resource availability varies, the natural selection process would make unchecked procreation rare.

So resource limitation is a given. That being the case, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages in two populations, one that has members that age and die, and the other that has members that do not age and die. If there is a limited amount of resources, then there is a limited population that can be sustained. Once the immortal group has reached the limit of its population, since there is no turnover, there is no further mutation. But in the group that ages and dies, there is continued mutation/adaptation/selection over time. As changes in resources occur, either good or bad, the group that has aging and death can adapt from a wider variety of options, whereas the immortal group is stuck with a limited variety of adaptability.

If this is the case, then natural selection seems to reward variability and not just reproduction. The fuel of natural selection is variability, and it must produce this fuel to sustain the process. The process of natural selection seems to value the ability to adapt over the ability to reproduce as part of its mechanics. Any static trait simply becomes future resources to be exploited once a more adaptable trait evolves to consume it. One of the continuing points of great debate in the field of evolutionary biology is whether the process of evolution occurs with the individual or within the population. If we see variability as the life-blood of natural selection, then we see that evolution as a process occurs in the individual only as part of a population. Especially in the human population, interpersonal relationships promote variability.

I have found it curious that if PSI ability is working through our biology, which research suggests it is, and because the reproductive advantage of PSI is so overpowering, then why aren't psychic powers universal in human beings and any other animal that needs to compete for resources? What could possibly be more advantageous, if the lifeblood of natural selection is adaptability, than the ability to foresee environmental changes that need to be adapted to? If my PSI skills tell me where the best food is, where the tigers are that want to eat me are, and when the next drought will occur, then I certainly am more likely to pass that PSI trait along to the next generation than the poor souls without PSI skills. I have never heard a counter-argument that makes any sense, though if you have one I'd like to hear it, email me at Benton@rhine.org or post it in the comments.

Using the earlier understanding of why death is built into our biology, you can see why readily accessible psychic skills are going to be selected out of the population. While the conscious ego is designed by nature to protect and prolong life, if PSI skills were part of its toolkit then the variability would quickly be reduced in the population's gene pool. Even though the individuals could foresee future needs to adapt, that doesn't actually create new variability in the gene-pool, it reduces it by keeping the animals alive that have that certain gene for PSI and selecting out others. Curiously, the tipping point where the PSI ability would allow for increased adaptability comes when PSI information can be used to adapt, and the ability to do such logical planning and strategizing with information is relatively recent evolution-wise in humans. Looking at our present situation in the world with environmental and political crises all around us, its debatable if we've even reached that point yet. Bottom line, PSI skills can exist but not as conscious tools, so they show up as capricious events, usually to support interpersonal relationships, and then seem to disappear when most people actively try to utilize them. Given current environmental constraints, the process of natural selection is no friend of PSI ability.” -- Benton Bogle

Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!

2010-10-19T10:48:00.000-07:00

Daryl Bem is one of our leading parapsychologists, and on our Advisory Board

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." Alice attempts to argue with the Queen, stating "I'm sure mine only works one way...I can't remember things before they happen." The Queen replies, "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

How much better would our lives be if we could live in the White Queen's kingdom, where ours memory would work backwards and forewords? For instance, in such a world, you could take an exam and then study for it afterwards to make sure you performed well in the past. Well, the good news is that according to a recent series of scientific studies by Daryl Bem, you already live in that world!

Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of studies that will soon be published in one of the most prestigious psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). Across nine experiments, Bem examined the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.
Although prior research has been conducted on the psi phenomena - we have all seen those movie images of people staring at Zener cards with a star or wavy lines on them - such studies often fail to meet the threshold of "scientific investigation." However, Bem's studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology - studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times - and simply reversed their chronological order
Read more here...

A Great Visit With Gary Schwartz

2010-10-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

One of the many wonderful things about volunteering at the Rhine Research Center is the opportunity to interact with scientists doing important work in the field of parapsychology. I had the pleasure of meeting Gary E. Schwartz, PhD last Friday evening as he talked about his most recent research and his forthcoming book "The Sacred Promise", due out in January. His experiments over years with mediums has evolved over time to the point where he is able to develop strong research design, and his finding are amazing, and full of potential.

When the Rhines began their research many decades ago, there was a lot of hope that their scientific skills could finally show experimental evidence of an "afterlife". Many folks had lost loved ones in the Great War and wanted to be comforted with scientific proof of a spiritual realm. There were also a tremendous number of people reporting ghostly visitation and other communications, and many of these folks came to the Rhines for answers. At the time, studying such things with proper methods and controls was extremely difficult. Things are different today, as Dr. Schwartz is now able to work with improved research design and new technology. Has he discovered evidence of the afterlife? You are encouraged to read this book and judge for yourself. I assure you his findings will inspire you, they are amazing.

I also had a brief but enlightening chat with him before his talk about what I have been blogging about recently, that is multiple consciousnesses in our mind. From my reading and experiences with many remote viewers, and from his work with mediums, evidence seems to suggest that the true location of consciousness is not in your brain. The brain is a transceiver, like a radio or TV in that it is attuned to "you". Mediums and remote viewers can get information from other consciousnesses that exist. Sometimes anyone gets bits and pieces of anomalous info we cannot place, as our normal waking minds work to filter out any information that is not "you." As I mentioned in an earlier blog, any thoughts that any part of "you" does not fit into the well defined "you" is usually quickly rejected, along with some eye rolling. But this model of consciousness goes a long way in explaining a lot of phenomena, and I look forward to boring you more with it in the future.
-- Benton Bogle

Listen to Gary E. Schwartz, PhD interview with Frank Stacio on The State of Things

This inspiring talk led to much discussion afterwards at the reception.

Many people had questions for Gary E, Schwartz.

Can Consciousness Comprehend Its Own Mechanics?

2010-09-15T08:14:00.000-07:00

I wrote previously about the difficulty of studying a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself, in other words, "Can consciousness comprehend its own mechanics?".

We have to say "Yes" or else pull up stakes and move on to some other subject, but otherwise we really have to get a handle on how we work with the limitations inherent in this subject. My point in my last blog was that our ego-mind is designed to do one thing, and it is not naturally going to adapt to a multi-consciousness model of how perception works.

But from what I have seen, and many parapsychologists agree, along with most psychologists, that there are multiple consciousnesses at work in each of us. I have come to understand that the other consciousness seems to have different senses, what JB Rhine would describe as an Extra Sense. And again, we lump all these PSI phenomenon together as perhaps manifestations of one "Superpower of the Biomind" as Ingo Swann would call it, but in fact there may be multiple other senses in use by these other consciousness. So you are probably rolling your eyes at this point but that is precisely my point from the last blog, even suggesting such a mechanical structure for your mind is absurd, because the ego-consciousness cannot tolerate the idea. And that's as far as such speculation gets in most people.

Keeping in mind of course it could be a stupid notion, too. These blog entries of mine do not reflect the opinion of the RRC, and if you have any insight or concern you wish to provide regarding what I have written, please drop me an email at bbogle@triad.rr.com.

I could be barking up the wrong tree regarding sensory modalities for other consciousnesses. Take a look at the evidence, then place it in a multi-consciousness model, and see how it fits. Please resist the temptation to take the "black box" of Parapsychology and try to fit in it black boxes from other sciences, all that does is make a bigger black box. We will be having a guest speaker at our next Remote Viewing meeting on October 15th at 7pm. This person has been developing a data gathering website for PSI testing, and will be presenting the findings as well as the ideas that the evidence has suggested. This will be a great example of studying PSI with the data of the phenomenon, and I hope you can all be there.
-- Benton Bogle

Changing Our Universe

2010-09-10T10:52:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog I talked about multiple minds or consciousnesses, and it is my, Rene Warcollier and scads of current parapsychological enthusiast's belief that PSI data, and other information too, comes to our waking consciousness from another consciousness. That is pretty standard fare. But what is not so typical is what I am about to suggest. As a matter of fact you may consider it a bit weird, but that is simply because your measure of weird is completely controlled by your ego-mind.

The ego mind is in charge, it is your normal, every-day consciousness that tells you who you are, and how the world works. It tells you what is weird and what is normal. It is the center from which you view the world, it is who "you" define yourself to be, and it is the point on the graph that you measure out every thing. For a much more thorough and thought provoking exploration of this idea, check out Mark Leary's book "The Curse of the Self".

It is a function of our normal waking ego-consciousness to define itself, then do everything it can to promote that self. So it is natural to note that some of the most horrifying and abhorrent things to the ego-mind are things that threaten its self-definition. The very idea of other consciousnesses sharing its space is unacceptable to the normal consciousness, and it does what it can to refute such things. As a matter of fact, look how the waking consciousness has labeled that other consciousness. We call it the "subconscious" or the "unconscious", when in fact it is quite the equal to the normal waking mind and in many ways superior, in the areas of memory, multi-functioning and creativity, not to mention PSI information. It certainly isn't "un-conscious", it seems quite aware and active and capable. We give it such unflattering names because it scares the ego-mind, along with other things like death and lack of "control". Our definition of this other consciousness, by describing it as under, below, beneath or alien to the normal mind, shows how the ego-mind wants to relate to it. But even though the ego-mind is designed to work toward greater "self definition" so it can take better biological care of itself, we limit our greater potential by alienating a real part of our psyche, and we also cut ourself off from the source of PSI data.

The history of modern psychology as a science has been one of gradually warming up to the non-ego-mind that exists in us. Many current self-help psychology books will help you "find yourself" and help you strengthen your ego-control. But others assist the reader in developing the self-assurance necessary to open up communication and friendly interaction with our other minds. My reading of the literature, and my personal experiences, as well as most religions, tell us that this consciousness that transcends the ego-mind is consciousness without selves. But this idea is so scary to the ego-mind, it mocks and fights attempts to view the universe as anything other than the product of the ego-mind. Psychology, parapsychology, and most if not all other sciences view the world through the lens of the ego-mind, and I suspect that future breakthroughs in the sciences will require a new point of reference in our understanding of consciousness and the ego-mind's place in it. When Copernicus asked his fellow thinkers to move the point of reference from earth to the sun, they struggled because it required them to change the universe. I have found that to work with Remote Viewing as we do in our monthly group, and in our daily sessions, we benefit from changing our minds, and in doing so, changing our universe. The associate consciousness in each of us is accessible, and it is there that the PSI data we are looking for is to be found. With a little patient, persistent and careful effort, just like you build a relationship with another, you can improve your communication with this associate-consciousness.
-- Benton Bogle

A Slightly Different Take on "How PSI Works"

2010-09-03T14:21:00.000-07:00

I am re-reading Rene Warcollier’s “Mind to Mind” as published by Hampton Roads, with a preface by Ingo Swann, no less. It’s a wonderful book I would recommend to anyone interested in parapsychology and the early studies of PSI. My point here is not to critique the book but instead to point out how frontier science forces its participants to be uncomfortably adaptable in their evolving understanding of what they are observing. There is certainly a great deal of data showing the phenomenon exists, and certainly variables that can be tweaked to improve or degrade PSI events in a lab setting, there is not a model that describes how it works that is accepted by the field, and can be used to explain why changes in variables cause changes in PSI performance.

Mr. Swann in his preface points out how Mr. Warcollier’s contemporaries in the Institute Métapsychique International explored with a model for how PSI worked that was different from their British or American counterparts. This American model was looking for some sort of communication between the conscious minds of the participants as though they were physically connected through some faint communications channel. The French model was looking for the transfer of information to occur between non-conscious aspects of the subjects. Its this idea that lead to the use of the term “Extra-sensory” perception in that there are sensory modalities other than the 5 we are familiar with.

Of course this idea of multiple consciousnesses is not new either, Freud made the idea famous generations ago. From my own experiences it appears that there exists in each of us other consciousnesses that are processing information too, as our waking ego-consciousness does, though perhaps not limited to the single focus our ego’s have to work with. This other consciousness seems to use some of our five senses to get information and may process that information through our brains using the same brain areas our conscious ego-mind does. The other consciousness(s) seem also to have other senses, modalities to process information, than our ego-minds do, and this is where the PSI information comes in.

Perhaps, as we go through our day, sensory information is coming in and utilized by our ego-mind and our other consciousness, and they both are processing that information for whatever function they use it for. As they are perhaps sharing brain areas to process information, it is here that some PSI data “leaks” over into our conscious minds. It may be that the data passing through the neurons are in a pattern that is utilized one way for the ego-mind and another way for the other consciousness. Its may be similar to the way some machines process numbers in hexadecimal and some in decimal, and there are parts of the hexadecimal that are recognizable by a decimal number reader but not all of it, so the decimal processer is getting only part of the data.

Since there would be more “leakage” if the two minds are processing the same data at the same time, that is why it helps in PSI testing to use “intent” to draw the attention of both consciousnesses to the same event. That is why PK and ESP data shows up more when the event is important, because both consciousnesses are attending to it and processing the event.

If you are curious about what things interest the other consciousness, just take a look at anecdotes about PSI events to figure that out. Go back and read Stacy Horn's recent book "Unbelievable" and examine the stories about what was effective in ESP research back in the early days of PSI lab work. It seems that the “other consciousness” is interested in emotion, relationship, novelty and life-changing events. I would suspect that adding more of these qualities to PSI research would be beneficial in increasing the occurrence of PSI. Re-reading Warcollier’s book and looking at other studies of paranormal events while keeping this other consciousness in consideration really shines a new light on one’s understanding of the PSI process. This slightly different take on “how PSI works” has evolved for me as I read over current studies, and reflect on the great wealth of research done in the past, such as those of Warcollier.
--Benton Bogle

Annual Convention of Parapsychologists was held in Paris in July 2010

2010-08-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

The principal international scientific organization studying the nature of consciousness, the Parapsychological Association (PA), held its 53rd annual convention in Paris, France on July 22-25, 2010. Members of the PA who are engaged in the study of psychic (psi) experiences, including extrasensory perception (ESP) , psychokinesis (PK), psychic healing, precognition and survival of bodily death. Leading scientists and scholars from universities and laboratories around the world gathered to present and discuss their latest research findings on these sometimes controversial, but always fascinating, aspects of human consciousness.

Sally Rhine Feather, John Palmer, Sandra Shelton and Annette LePoris attended the conference. The event featured over 30 presentations on a variety of parapsychological topics. Sally Rhine Feather presented the results of a survey on psychokinesis conducted at the the Rhine Research Center by Dr. Feather and Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore, a Research Associate at the Rhine Research Center.

Other presentations included historical and case studies of mediums, including a neuroimaging study of mediumistic trance, the effects of geomagnetic activity on psi, meditation and psychic functioning, anomalous mental phenomena studied in South America and Tibet, telephone telepathy, psychokinetic experiences, and the application of psi in archeology.
The convention’s keynote speaker was Paul Devereux, managing editor and co-founder of the peer-reviewed publication, Time & Mind - The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. A research associate at the Royal College of Art and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Devereux was a Senior Research Fellow with the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL) in Princeton for twelve years. He has written 27 books since 1979. His latest work, Sacred Geography, a look at ancient and traditional mindscapes, is due out in October 2010.
Other notable speakers included Russell Targ, a physicist and author who was a pioneer in the development of the laser and laser applications, and is best known in parapsychology for his pioneering research on "remote viewing," a form of ESP, sponsored by U.S. government intelligence agencies in the 1970s and 1980s. The winner of PA’s 2009 Career Award, Targ’s invited address was titled, Why I am absolutely convinced of the reality of psychic abilities, and why you should be, too. Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Saybrook University, fellow of the American Psychological Association, and author of numerous articles and books on dreams, hypnosis, altered states of consciousness, led a workshop on psi and creativity. Sally Rhine Feather was the recipient of the PA's 2010 Outstanding Career Award.

The conference was hosted by the Institut Métapsychique International and held at Enclos Rey in Paris.

About the Parapsychological Association:

The Parapsychological Association is the international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of consciousness-related experiences and phenomena known as 'psi'’ (or 'psychic') experiences. The primary objective of such studies is to achieve a scientific understanding of these experiences. The PA was first established in 1957, and has been an affiliated organization of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 1969. It provides an international forum for scholarly exchange through annual conferences, generally held in North America or in Europe, and through the publication of its Mindfield bulletin. There are approximately 300 PA members around the world.

Photos courtesy of Sandra Shelton

New Issue of Rhine Online!

2010-07-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

We are excited about this summer 2010 issue of our Psi News Magazine. Our general focus is on complementary and alternative healing techniques. Psi and healing is a topic that arises frequently in discussions, talks, and workshops at the Rhine, and one of great interest to the community at large. In fact, one of our current research projects started by the late Dr. Steve Baumann, and continued by Dr. Bill Joines is a study of photon emission in bio-energy healers.

Alternative healing is directly linked to psi. In a 2001 paper, Daniel Benor, MD, uses the term “psi healing,” in fact, to describe various healing techniques. He says:This paper accepts the existence of psi healing (also called spiritual, mental and paranormal healing) to be an established fact. The author has found 152 published studies of healing (Benor 1990; Benor in press). More than half of these demonstrate significant effects. There is thus more research on healing than on all the other complementary therapies combined, with the exception of hypnosis and psychoneuroimmunology. Psi healing demonstrates that the mind of a healer can alter the conditions of organisms, including cells in vitro, bacteria, yeasts, plants, animals and humans. In addition, there is evidence that healers may influence water, crystallization of salt solutions and enzymes. Some of these studies show significant effects of healing at a distance.

In terms of popularity in the mainstream world, what Benor calls “psi healing” may be one of the rare examples where the believers are coming close to balancing out the skeptics. For example, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, approximately 38 percent of adults and approximately 12 percent of children in the United States were using some form of complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) as of 2007, and the figure is steadily rising. These therapies include yoga, tai chi, massage, meditation, Reiki, acupuncture, shamanism, etc.

In this issue, we hope to illuminate some of these healing techniques. Dr. Katherine MacDowell, respected author and the founder of Ocean Seminary College, gives an overview of shamanic practice and techniques, especially as related to her personal tradition. Additionally, Dagmar Ehling, licensed doctor of Oriental Medicine, gives an extensive overview of acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and their guiding principles. Reiki, an energy healing technique that originated in Japan, works with the same conceptual understanding as acupuncture, and from my experience as a Reiki Master Teacher, I give a brief introduction to Reiki in an interview.
Jane Katra, PhD a renowned healer from the northwest United States, shares two powerful stories with us. In one, she describes a distant healing experience with Russell Targ, one of our recent speakers and the founder of remote viewing in the United States. In the other, she describes an extraordinary afterlife visit from Dr. Elisabeth Targ, associated with healing and comforting at a distance. You will have to read for yourself to understand the uniqueness of these interactions.

Some of our most common therapeutic experiences are the healing interactions we have with animals. We include two powerful examples in this issue. Sally Rhine Feather, Executive Director of the Rhine Center, shares with us a miraculous story of a human, Anthony Swaney, healing a small kitten through an energy healing technique. In the reverse, my article titled “The Healing Power of Dolphins” discusses the powerful ways in which an animal species heals us.

Jack Hunter, the editor of Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, shares with us a powerful commentary on anthropologists and their experiences during field work. If an anthropologist is fully immersed in a ritual, the intended results of that ritual are typically undeniably experienced. In this way, anthropologists may sometimes be our closest scientific link between the worlds of mainstream science and ancient practices (such as shamanism, energy healing, and the like).

Finally, we want to bring you closer to the current personalities and activities at the Rhine Research Center through a number of interviews:

Christine Simmonds-Moore, PhD, our visiting researcher, sheds light on her research, her interests, and her entrance into the world of parapsychology at a young age. Bob Gebelein, our featured volunteer this quarter, describes the work he does at the Rhine Center, his decision to move here to be closer to the Center, and his viewpoint about parapsychology and Harvard University.

Last but not least, we give an overview of the Rhine events from this spring and summer with an in-depth sample of two programs as experienced by Dave Roberts, managing editor of the Journal of Parapsychology, and an extensive interview with Joe McMoneagle, a recent popular speaker and workshop leader renowned for his acumen in remote viewing.

We hope you enjoy the issue. Please e-mail me at Jennifer@Rhine.org or my co-editor, Mark A. Schroll, PhD, at Mark@Rhine.org with any comments or suggestions for future issues, and do drop by the Rhine Center whenever you are in Durham, North Carolina.

Reflections on Rhea White's Presidential Address to the 1984 Convention of the Parapsychological Association

2010-06-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

One of the many good things about not having read every book, article and research paper in the field of parapsychology is that I am regularly thrilled by a new find.

The downside of course is that I sure wish I had read Rhea White's Presidential Address to the 1984 Convention of the Parapsychological Association years ago. These presidential addresses usually cover a lot of ground, but there are some fantastic points she makes that shed a lot of light on current thinking in the field. You may have been present for her speech, or you may have read the article years ago, but something struck me at the beginning of the speech that may benefit us to take another look today.

Remember, its 1984 when the speech was made. The parapsychological world is just learning about Remote Viewing from Targ and Harary's book "Mind Race". Cellphones had just been invented, were the size of a brick, and wouldn't become widely used for another decade or two. In 1984, the Macintosh was introduced, the first personal computer using a mouse and a graphical user interface.

Rhea White's address emplored parapsychologist to break out of their current mindset in viewing PSI and its mechanics, since she felt new approaches were needed to discover productive areas of research. To stress the frustrating nature of PSI research at the time, she used the example of the telephone ringing spontaneously, as PSI events are almost always just as capricious.. She asked, how can we make it ring again, who is calling, why are they calling?

The telephone model, with a sender and reciever, was and still is a popular way of conceptualizing how PSI works. Her point in 1984 I don't think was to reinforce or support the sender/receiver idea of PSI, but to point out the difficulty in figuring out what is going on with a random phone ring, something we can still relate to in 2010. But my point here is to take her example and look at it in the light of our current telephone technology, and then update our view on how PSI works.

Back in 1984, for the most part, all calls had a sender and a reciever. Calls were carried with electrical signals on wire, from point A to point B. Other than the occassional thunderstorm, when the phone rang, it was because someone sent a signal on a line to make it ring. So back then, remote viewers talked about signal/noise ratios, and worked to make the signal stronger or the line noise less. To clean up the "signal line", efforts were made to insulate the line with all sorts of things, faraday cages, the ganzfeld, controlled remote viewing, hypnotism, you name it.

Modern phone technology is a little different. Signals from sender and reciever are sent out in every direction, the communication only occurs because the two locations share an agreed upon frequency upon which to transmit the signal. Hundreds of other signals are flying through the air at the same time, but your phone rings because it is receptive to a particular piece of information. The frequency can change with each use, if it does NOT change its an unusual conincidence. So if you get a call, then turn right around and try to find the sender again on that same frequency, it probably won't work. Many of the suggestions Ms. White makes for new approaches to research make a lot more sense if we update her 1984 phone technology to the present one.
Take this process and now think about the transmission of information in PSI events (if transmission of information is actually what is happening). Every person is receiving the information, but only if the person is tuned in to a particular signal will they get a useful communication. The other implications for updating our view of communication via "extrasensory perception" also provide new ways of working with research design and the "how-to" of PSI. I will leave all that up to the reader, my main point here is that evolving technologies such as computers, holograms, and many others give us an opportunity to likewise evolve our way of looking at PSI. Rhea White was asking readers in 1984 to change their course in researching and understanding PSI, and we can do just that by examining what new technologies can perhaps suggest to us about an old problem.
- Benton Bogle

A Report on Joe McMoneagle's visit to the Rhine from Benton Bogle

2010-06-08T10:03:00.000-07:00

Joe McMoneagle visited the Rhine Center last weekend (June 4th and 5th) and it was once again an amazing event. Joe is considered by many to be the finest Remote Viewer alive, having been tested hundreds of times and having appeared on numerous live TV programs displaying his talent. He does not do a lot of appearances and virtually no training, but occasionally he visits the Rhine Center to enlighten us with his knowledge and fascinating anecdotes from his lifetime of work in the highest levels of military intelligence. Joe was a "psychic spy" for the military for almost 20 years, and helped develop what we know as remote viewing today.

The first thing you notice about Joe is that he's a friendly guy who is eager to help you learn about Remote Viewing. He's direct and thorough, so you learn from him that discipline and practice is centrally important in improving your RV success. He talked about his own method, and how important it is for each of us to find our own process, and to dedicate ourselves to it.

Like any other skill, RV is something you have to make a part of your life, you need to care deeply about it and pursue it. If you are interested in learning about how Joe does Remote Viewing, you will do yourself a big favor by reading his book, "Remote Viewing Secrets" where he spells it all out. The book Joe recommends you read to put it all in perspective is his book "The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy". Like his talks, it is full of stories from the development and application of the Military/Government program that flourished in the 1970s through the mid 1990s. Fascinating reading, and Joe shared many stories from those years that did not make it into the books, and follow-ups to impressive viewings.

He spent a lot of time answering the questions of the audience members in his Friday night talk, and did the same on Saturday after putting us through our paces with numerous Remote Viewing sessions. He worked with us as viewers and monitors during the sessions, and emphasized where we were getting it right, and where we needed to improve.

I had the good fortune to have Joe as my monitor on a few sessions, and he really kept me on task and guided me to use effective strategies to get the information I was looking for. You could tell from the chatter on breaks and afterwards that everyone there got a lot from the day's education, and we took a lot of great training home with us to apply to our future Remote Viewing.

The Rhine Center will be posting a video of the Friday evening program if you are interested in hearing what went on. If you have the opportunity in the future to go hear Mr. McMoneagle speak, its a great experience. Anyone interested in Remote Viewing as a practice, or the exciting stories of its application in the intelligence/political field, should pick up a copy of Joe's books and give them a good read.

Memoirs of a Psychic Spy - A Radio Interview with Joe McMoneagle

2010-06-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

Friday, June 04 2010 by Frank Stasio and Lindsay Thomas

For years, Joe McMoneagle was known as “Remote Viewer No. 1” during his involvement in a top-secret military program called The Stargate Project. The multi-million dollar federal program was set up to determine the potential for military use of psychic phenomena like ESP and remote viewing, the ability to gather information about unseen places or objects. The idea seems implausible, but the research project ran from the 1970s through the mid-1990s. McMoneagle has documented his experiences as a remote viewer in the book “The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy” (Hampton Roads/2002) and this weekend, he’ll speak to audiences at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, NC. First, he joins host Frank Stasio to talk about psychic experiments in the military and how remote viewing is used today.
Click Here to Listen

Seeking participants for study on individual differences and normal and paranormal pattern detection

2010-06-02T10:32:00.000-07:00

Participants are needed for an ongoing study (funded by the Bial foundation) which is exploring individual differences in pattern detection. The study is exploring the observation that a lot of paranormal experiences occur against a random backdrop (e.g., reading the tea leaves and "electronic voice phenomena") and there is a human tendency to find patterns (e.g., seeing shapes in clouds). This study is looking particularly for people who are definitely disbelievers in paranormal phenomena to take part.

The study consists of filling out a questionnaire and then coming to take part in a computerized study comprising a series of visual noise and auditory noise trials (some trials have targets (weak stimuli and "ESP" targets associated with them, while others will be just random noise). The computerized part of the study takes around an hour and a half to complete and participants will each be given a cinema or book voucher worth $15 to thank them for their time.
The experiment is taking place in Durham at the Rhine Research Center (2741 Campus Walk Avenue, opposite the Millennium Hotel and near to Duke's West Campus)

Please see the study website at http://www.wix.com/simmonc/patternexperiment or contact Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore or 919 951 8916 for more information or to sign up.

TWIN TALK ON WORLD TALK RADIO.COM

2010-05-11T10:42:00.000-07:00

Dr. Bob Van de Castle is my guest on 5/28 Twin Dreams
Guy Playfair on 6/4 Twin Telepathy.

The number of twin births has doubled in 20 years. More than 2 in every 100 persons is now a twin or multiple. The chances of living in close relationship with a twin are increasing rapidly. Designed for twins, want-to-be twins, parents, children, spouses, partners of twins and anyone who finds twins fascinating, this program will entertain and inform. Society has feared, revered, and sensationalized twinship. Twin Talk will uncover the truth about twins. Dr. Mercy will spotlight the latest science on learned vs. inherited traits, raising twins, understanding twins, living with twins, and twin loss. Our guests will be researchers, therapists, authors, twins themselves and you. We will discuss mental telepathy, premonition, and after life communication. Dr. Mercy and the twins can guarantee that you will adapt to the post modern world of facsimiles and identicality once you know ‘It’s a twin thing!’ Twin Talk airs live Fridays at 11 AM Eastern on World Talk Radio Variety
Twin Services

Twin Articles

Twin Talk Fridays 11am ET

Rosemarie Pilkington

2010-04-19T08:16:00.001-07:00

Rosemarie Pilkington paid the Rhine Center a visit recently and it was a great experience. She was an engaging speaker and thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end. She provided us with a wealth of information on the history of "table tipping" and seances from ancient times to the present. Her attitude and approach to the matter was professional but also enthusiastic, you really got a feeling that this subject was something she enjoyed learning about and sharing with us.

The Friday night event was on her book and experiences with the Dr. Bindelof case, and Saturday's all-day workshop covered a wider historical review and different techniques and advances made in this area of study. We got to work with many of the media on Saturday and those experiences were a lot of fun. We tried our hands at table tipping, Ouija boards, and spoon-bending and there was a good bit of useless silverware when we were finished. Rosemarie opened our eyes to a lot of possibilities with her visit and I'm looking forward to future events like this one.
contributed by Benton Bogle

Remote Viewing Group Update - Judith Morse Teaches Meditation Skills

2010-04-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

The remote viewing group was excited about our guest on Wednesday night. Judith Morse dropped by to teach us about Meditation. If you have done much remote viewing, or been to any of the workshops of folks like Joe McMoneagle or Russell Targ, you know regular meditation is something that can really benefit a remote viewer. Both skills require practice, patience, and learning to control your attention. The same skills that make a good meditator make a good remote viewer. So Judith described some of the important types of meditation, she walked us through what we would experience, and then she helped us do some meditation there at the meeting. Meditation is at the same time simple and very involved, and Judith did a great job of explaining the fundamental process and the great potential this simple skill provides.

We had a pretty good crowd there, and from the discussion after the meditation training, it was clear that Judith's teaching had a real impact. Most of us had some experience with Meditation in the past, to others it was new, but all the comments were positive, and we had a great conversation as a group on how to work with our attention, how to quiet some of the mental noise that interferes with Remote Viewing, and of course the many benefits of Meditation. Though this meeting was unusual for us, I can see that we will need to bring Judith back periodically because of the value these skills have for people serious about remote viewing. Like all of our meetings, it was fun to see people learning new things, sharing their exciting experiences, and leaving the meeting with a sense of adventure.

As promised, at our next meeting we will be doing an outbounder session, as one of our group will be vacationing in Peru and will act as our outbounder "sender". If you aren't familiar with Remote Viewing jargon, an outbounder session was one of the first types of Remote Viewing developed by the early SRI/Military researchers. It involves a sender/outbounder and viewer (in our case, viewers). The outbounder goes out to a location that the viewers have no knowledge of, and at a certain time, the viewers do a session to get information on the location/experience of the outbounder person at that time. Normally, the viewer would later visit the same location that was viewed, but its doubtful we will fly the entire group to Peru (translated: ain't gonna happen). But our outbounder will take lots of notes and photos, and present this data to us later for feedback. In any case, it should be a lot of fun.

We will be meeting on May 12th in the library of the Rhine Research Center at 7pm, do not be late.

Russell Targ's Wonderful Presentation on Remote Viewing

2010-03-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

Russell Targ's recent weekend visit to the RRC was absolutely fantastic and all you'd expect it to be. We had a huge crowd out for the Friday night event where Mr. Targ gave us a wonderful presentation on Remote Viewing and his history in the development of this skill. It was great to hear anecdotes of his experiences in the SRI and military programs, and how he interacted with some of the more famous viewers. He shared some of his insights into the nature of the phenomenon, and took lots of questions from the audience there. He showed a great sense of humor and a love for the science he talked with us about, which made his talk all the more enjoyable. Mr. Targ emphasized the way Buddhist thought sheds light on the PSI events we witness, and how important the reality of our connectedness is to our understanding Remote Viewing.

Then on Saturday Russell talked with us about the dynamics of Remote Viewing, and led us in a number of practices over the course of the day. Those of us attending received instruction from a person instrumental in the very creation of the Remote Viewing field. The different targets selected, and the varied procedures used highlighted the important considerations in any remote viewing session. We discussed the process and shared feedback on our experiences. As always in these group sessions, the shared knowledge of fellow viewers was a real boon to our learning. Russell added his own insights, gleaned from decades of experience in working with the best remote viewers in the world.

The members of the remote viewing group that meets monthly at the RRC, the staff on hand, and all the visitors from across the country in attendance shared a wonderful few days of Remote Viewing education. Mr. Targ's scientific knowledge and practical Remote Viewing skills, as well as his joy in exploring the non-local connections we share added up to a marvelous experience. Hopefully we will have him back for another visit in the future, and the Rhine Center is very grateful for the learning event he provided us. We are likewise looking forward to other Remote Viewing events in the near future, such as the PSI games on Friday, and visits from Joe McMoneagle and Dale E. Graff later this summer. Please contact the RRC soon if you are interested in these events.

- written by Benton Bogle

Rhine Center to Screen the First East Coast Showing of Something Unknown!

2010-03-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Friday, May 7, 2010

7:30 to 9 pm

at the Stedman Auditorium, Durham, NC

"Something Unknown is Doing We Don't Know What" is a moving story of a woman's spiritual journey to uncover the science of psychic experience. Under the guidance of Dr. Charles Tart, her journey explores and answers many questions about psychic and paranormal phenomena. Dutch filmmaker Renee Scheltema goes straight to the scientists, psychics and healers for straight answers about psychic and paranormal experiences:
Can we predict the future?
Can our thoughts and intentions affect the physical world?

Can we be spontaneously healed?

Are we “mysteriously” connected?

The film documents evidence that the mind can affect matter. It demystifies psychic and paranormal experiences and presents rare glimpses into laboratory experiments, spiritual healings and declassified government archives. “Something Unknown” reveals scientific evidence that consciousness can influence the physical world. It uncovers decades of pioneering research conducted by governments, universities, and independent scientists to explore quantum physics principles that indicate humans are interconnected and have extended capacities of consciousness that transcend time and space.

Buy your tickets in advance.

The Aftermath of Russell Targ Weekend

2010-03-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

Dear Volunteers & Friends,

Thank you so much for your support and help to make this past weekend program with Russell Targ such a huge success. With about 100 folks on Friday evening and about 40 attendees for Saturday's all-day workshop, our volunteer operation was put to the test. . But our speaker Russell seemed extremely pleased with his first visit here with us, felt very good about his response from the audience and thanked me for the very nice party in his honor last evening. The fact that he got a standing ovation from the workshop participants last evening is a tribute to the whole operation as well as to Russell's special inspiring way of facilitating remote viewing and sharing his knowledge, wisdom and Buddhist insights with us.

Once again I thank you for your help in making this one of the most successful programs that we have sponsored at the Rhine Center in my memory.
Sally

Dear Sally,
What a magnificent weekend! Russell Targ selflessly brought his beautiful, powerful, and soothing energy to the Rhine and I know everyone was fascinated by his presentation, attracted to his persona, and attached to his colorful humor. And as for my participation in the workshop, I had great success with the experiments. He is the first teacher in 20 years who was able to dial me into his particular method of clairvoyance in a seamless and powerful manner. What a treat! My RV partner and I were thrilled!

As I watched you two together, I witnessed a bright, charged aura of intellectual/spiritual greatness -- two giants of the psi world. I'm glad you're pleased with the outcome. The standing ovation at the end of the day was not just for Russell -- it was for you as well.
--J. Roy

We'd love to hear comments from others who attended the workshop.
Russel Targ's Website

Targ’s notes from My Big Toe (Theory Of Everything), by Thomas Campbell

2010-02-25T11:03:00.000-08:00

Greetings,
I just spent a weekend with Thomas Campbell, who is a physicist working with NASA at Huntsville. He has written a big, 800 page book called "My Big Toe," a theory of everything. He has a number of interesting and original ideas in our various fields of interest, which I have summarized below for your entertainment.
Warm regards,
Russell

Targ’s notes from My Big Toe (Theory Of Everything), by Thomas Campbell
Weekend workshop, Campbell, Calif., February 20-21, 2010

Theory and experience are both necessary for understanding.
We live in a Reality, based on Physics and Matter, PMR
Don’t just pay attention to the stage and the sets, there are also people.
Notice the big picture.
The relationship of physical reality to consciousness is fundamental.
There is no objective reality. Everything is statistical. Bit to it. (John Wheeler)
Reality is a digital simulation. Consciousness is information. [Empty of meaning]
The purpose of consciousness is to lower its entropy and become love.
Growth is essential. Evolve or die.
A form of nonphysical energy exists, capable of changing itself.
Consciousness is a form of nonphysical energy. Assumption One.
It is not possible to describe the superset in terms of the subset. Assumption Two.
[You can learn Word, but you have no access to the operating system.]
Our purpose is to learn the rule set [the organizing principles] for the system.
It is hard to make “the system” serve your ego, since that is not its purpose.
The system wants to reduce entropy [and increase coherence].
[This can be done, but it requires energy.]
Consciousness will inform quantum mechanics when consciousness is understood.
Consciousness is outside of space and time.
Love lowers ones entropy promoting health.
Fear increases entropy, chaos tears the self apart creating illness.
Ghosts, little people, and UFOs all are in an alternate reality outside of space and time.
Data is spread all over the hard drive, like David Bohm’s implicate order.
Our intention modifies the probability of events!

Remote Viewing Group Update

2010-02-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

One of our group regulars, Scott, gave a great presentation on the relationship between Local Sidereal Time and Remote Viewing at our recent meeting. He presented the studies that have occurred over the years regarding the phenomenon and related issues, and Scott also discussed some of the theories as to why the relationship between the stars in the sky and our ESP on the ground occurs. It was fascinating, and of course initiated a great deal of discussion within the group. We also did a remote viewing session for a target Scott provided, and we had a good time discussing the processes we use to get target data.

Our next meeting will be Wednesday March 10th at 7pm in the Tanous Library there at the RRC. This will be mere days before the center hosts Russell Targ, one of pioneers in the Remote Viewing research and applications field. Both events will be a thrill to anyone interested in Remote Viewing.

More About Spoon Bending

2010-01-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

On January 29th the Rhine will be having a "Spoon Bending Party" facillitated by Bill Joines, Carl Blackman and Bonnie Albright. This is one event where you will want to buy your tickets in advance as the seating is limited.

I posted these two videos of Diana Gazes The Lighteam, who led hundreds of spoonbending workshops. She now resides in Mt. Shasta and leads workshops and gives private sessions.

Remote Viewer's Group Report from Benton Bogle

2010-01-14T05:54:00.000-08:00

Last night's Remote Viewer's meeting was once again a thrill. I arrived good and early, and after a brief altercation with the security system, I plopped down my equipment to get ready for the meeting. I had brought along a target for Remote Viewing practice. We like to try at least one target per meeting. The Remote Viewing meetings usually consist of a short presentation on one of a wide range of topics, some discussion about the topic, a remote viewing session, and then reflections and observations on our experiences in the session. It's extremely helpful and fun to be able to sit with other viewers and share insights, knowledge and experience regarding our Remote Viewing.

Anyway, before anyone arrived, I placed the target ( a small box containing one of my work gloves) on top of some other boxes there in the library where we have the meeting, out of sight of the meeting area. Then I went back over to the table and set up the laptop, projector and screen. I greeted folks and chatted with them as they entered, and at the designated time we started the meeting. The presentation was on "Relating to the Subconscious" and I talked about many things I had learned about relating and interacting with the subconscious, and we all shared strategies and ideas about this topic. Then we did our Remote Viewing session. Keep in mind no one there knew what or where the target was. Earlier things we had remote viewed at other meetings included vacations, photos of famous events, objects there in the building, a wide range of targets. We took about 20 minutes to do our session, and when we finished everyone put down their pens and paper and I retrieved the box. I opened it and poured out the glove onto the table in front of the group. The participant to my right gasped and held up the session notes. The first two words on the page: Box, Glove. The next participant to the right started their session with Appaloosa horse, and embossed on the back of the workglove was a horse. The other participants got bits and pieces of the information on the target, and everyone was excited about the results. And of course, it was a lot of fun.

I am very much looking forward to our next meeting on February 10th at 7pm in the Alex Tanous Library there at the RRC. I hope to see you there.

The Remote Viewing Group meets on the second Wednesday of every month. It is open to the public.

Spiritual Beings having a Human Experience...

2010-01-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

This past Friday evening (1/8), I had the good fortune to attend one of the most meaningful presentations I have experienced in a very long time, Mitch Krucoff speaking on what he calls the "Intangibles" to be integrated into traditional western healthcare. These Intangibles include prayer, imagery, thought, touch, music and so on. I wasn't the only one to feel this way about the evening. When Mitch finished speaking, not a sound was to be heard. The entire audience sat in silence, wrapped in the significance of what he had just shared with us. For those who weren't fortunate enough to be there, do not despair, a videotape of the presentation will soon be posted on www.rhine.org. Mitch has been on the Board of the Sri Satya Sai hospital since 1990. Now there are two of these hospitals and you will learn about them in the video. He is also a cardiac surgeon at Duke Hospital, so he speaks about medicine from both sides of our globe with plenty of direct experience.

One of the more powerful messages for me from this evening was to focus on how far western medicine has come in bringing what used to be Alternative, then Complementary Medicine into its venue. We now call it Integrative Medicine. The change in those words is significant. Yes, we have a long way to go, and we must remember that substantial progress has been made. Again, solid details are on the Krucoff video. We in America are certainly at a point where the redefinition of appropriate healthcare is high on many lists of discussion topics. There are many, often diverging, views as to what that redefinition should be.

I would be interested in seeing the thoughts of others on this topic, particularly if you attended Mitch's presentation or watch the recording of it. Let's not talk about the problems. There is plenty of talk about those in other places. Let's talk about the promising signs of progress as well as actionable ideas which can be implemented to accelerate that progress. The actionable ideas that we can do ourselves, rather than those which tell others what they must do, will be of particular interest.

With deep appreciation for Mitch Krucoff and the message he brings to light, I look forward to seeing your thoughts. - Pam Olson, Assistant Director of Rhine Research Center

For more information on Sathya Sai Baba International Sai Organization.

A Case of Deja Vecu

2010-01-03T08:17:00.000-08:00

Hi,

My name is Art Funkhouser and I am scheduled to give a talk and lead a workshop on déjà vu this coming June at the Rhine Center.

At the beginning of 2004 I put a questionnaire about "déjà experiences" up on the Internet (at http://silenroc.com/dejavu ) and by the end of 2009 over 2600 persons from all over the world had filled it out and helped contribute to our store of knowledge about these intriguing and often baffling phenomena. At the beginning of 2009 mywebsite http://www.deja-experience-research.org/ went on-line and since then an average of ca. 10 visitors a day have had a look at it. Toward the end of December, 2009 I received the account I'll share with you here (and on the website - with the writer's permission). I thought some might find this interesting:

"Over the past several months I've had a near-constant experience of deja vecu. Something will happen, and in the process I'll remember that I had a dream about this exact moment and I'll know just what comes next. I remember almost all of my dreams, including the mundane ones. What's convinced me that it's not somehow a trick of memory, though, is that I always remember when I had the dream and what I felt as I dreamed and when I awoke.

"One of the things I find odd when I compare my experiences to the experiences recounted on your site is that often the dream precedes the actual event by several months if not years. For example, the very first time I remember this happening was when I was thirteen, and the dream occurred when I was six. I was on the side of the stage in a rehearsal for a local kid's musical program when the director decided to take a quick break. During the break, the younger kids were sent home, and as they left one of the boys went up to me and my friend and hugged us goodbye. She remarked at how sweet and cheerful he was when he walked away. I remembered the dream when the boy broke off from the rest of the kids and ran over to us, and the rest of the scene played out exactly as I had dreamed it seven years previous. The way the stage was set and lit, what we were wearing, the boy's face and voice and my friend's comment - everything was the same.

"Up until about nine months ago, I would get the occasional deja vu experience but then something shifted. I'm almost 19 now, and I've already had my fair share of odd experiences but, in a way, the past several months have been the strangest ones so far. I used to think the future wasn't set in stone, that every little thing that happened had an effect that changed the whole world, and that there were an infinite number of futures and parallel worlds for each moment in which something could change. Now, experiencing deja vecu several times a day has led me to wonder if maybe the future (or at least parts of it) truly cannot be changed.

"What I've noticed is that the things I dream of are hardly ever important to me at the time of the dream, and often don't even make sense, but when the event happens it's something that makes me really happy or shocked or some other strong emotion. It's not always an event, per se, either. I read a lot, and sometimes I'll start on a book when I recognize the opening scene from one of my dreams. I'll take a moment to remember the dream, and as I keep reading it'll turn out that I dreamed about half of the book. Actually, this just happened to me earlier today and I finally realized why I had dreamed about falling from a railroad car as it vanished (ironically, this book is all about dreams; it's called Dreamhunter). Very rarely do my dreams last more than a few hours of an actual experience, though (I'm a fast reader). The same thing has been happening with anime episodes, manga chapters, and even discussions on forums, which are all the things I'm really into right now.

"I guess my point is, I've noticed that the events, when they occur, are things that are mundane but important. I get stronger feelings about them than about anything else. Perhaps this helps the idea of time loops, where the important things stick in your memory? I don't know how else to explain it other than seeing the future, and like I said, I've always believed in a changeable future and it's hard to think that that idea might be wrong. But if it really is seeing the future in dreams, then... Feeling deja vecu almost all the time has been both empowering and greatly unsettling due to that notion. "Reading the various accounts of deja vu on your site was a huge relief. I'm so glad I'm not the only one going through steady and specific deja vecu. I sure hope that someone is doing serious research on the deja phenomemons, and that whatever the cause is it will be discovered and made public knowledge sooner rather than later. Sites like yours, and other places where people can recount their experiences, should help quite a bit.

"Thank you so much for making this site! I hope my own account can enrich your knowledge of the phenomenon and help others feel like they're not alone in their experiences in turn."

By sharing this wonderful note, I am hoping others will now feel motivated to relate their experiences in comments to this blog. It would also be really great to see you at either the Rhine Center lecture or the workshop at the end of June.

Secret Service Took Psychic's Advice on Bush Assassination Plot

2009-12-15T17:14:00.000-08:00

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.

Remote Viewer's Group Report from Benton Bogle

2009-12-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

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.

Strange Science

2009-12-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

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.

A Viewers Guide to THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

2009-11-29T09:50:00.000-08:00

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

Battle satire 'Men Who Stare at Goats' has a Maryland link

2009-11-17T15:19:00.000-08:00

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

Remote Viewing Group at the Rhine

2009-11-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Lively Teleconferences at the Rhine!

2009-11-12T17:38:00.000-08:00

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.

"HAUNTED PEOPLE" POTENTIALLY EXPLAINED:

2009-10-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

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/

Taking a scientific approach to spooky

2009-10-29T06:22:00.000-07:00

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.”

GHOST BUSTERS WILL SHARE PARANORMAL RESEARCH & METHODS

2009-10-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Spirit of the Badge: 60 True Police Stories of Divine Guidance, Miracles and Intuition

2009-10-07T18:09:00.000-07:00

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!

Stuart Hameroff Will Be Speaking at the Rhine on Thursday, October 1st

2009-09-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

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.

Be sure to come and hear more!

Spirituality In Action: Transpersonal Psychology - Healing a World in Crisis

2009-08-20T12:45:00.000-07:00

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

An Interview with Larry Dossey

2009-07-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

“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:

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

A Message from Charley Tart

2009-07-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

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

Remote Viewing Expo online!

2009-07-02T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

announcing a conference on Health, Mental Health and Exceptional human experiences

2009-06-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

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,

Haunted house tale

2009-06-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

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.

"Do Ghosts Have ESP? Why Psi Is Necessary to Models of Apparitions, Hauntings & Poltergeists"

2009-06-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

Loyd Auerbach, MS
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?

Have you wondered how a ghost – a person without a body – can move objects? Or communicate with us without a mouth or voicebox? Or cause voices to appear on recording media (EVP)? Have you had any curiosity as to why some apparent ghosts seem to be un-intelligent and non-aware – recordings, so to speak? Or why parapsychologists consistently look to living people rather than the deceased in poltergeist cases?

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

Loyd Auerbach's Blog

The International Remote Viewing Association Questions Details of Twitter Remote Viewing Experiment

2009-06-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

June 7, 2009

In just the past few days, parapsychologist and skeptic Dr. Richard Wiseman has launched an innovative experiment on the Internet-based social networking service Twitter which aims to test the reality of the ESP-based phenomenon known as remote viewing (RV). In the tradition of similar mass experiments such as that conducted by Stephan Schwartz’s Moebius Group via Omni magazine in the 1980s, Dr. Wiseman hopes to enlist the aid of everyday humans in creating a large statistical sampling that will either tell for or against remote viewing.The International Remote Viewing Association, founded in 1999 by prominent former military and civilian members of the remote viewing community to disseminate information about and responsible investigation into remote viewing, applauds the imaginative way Dr. Richard Wiseman is using Twitter to explore the existence of this interesting phenomenon. We find the premise behind the experiment’s structure to be interesting and generally sound, and wish Dr. Wiseman well in demonstrating a successful outcome once all results are calculated.We do, however, have some reservations about details of the experiment, and are concerned that they may act to dampen the full success a mass experiment model of this sort might otherwise promise. These concerns are (in no order of importance):

1. That there may be too much similarity among some of the five targets in each of the four sets. To have the clearest chance of success, a remote viewing experiment of this sort requires there to be as much difference between the targets and as little similarity as possible (in technical terms, the targets should be as “orthogonal” as possible). However, in several of the target sets chosen for this experiment there is much overlap in composition, shape, color, and content which will likely make it harder for viewers to discriminate between them during the judging phase, when they must decide which of the targets they perceived during their remote viewing attempts.

2. The photos of the targets may perhaps be too narrowly cropped to minimally capture surrounding detail that might be perceived by would-be viewers. RV is a largely perceptual and minimally cognitive process, so the realities of human perception must be taken into account when selecting the targets to be used in the sets. Further, remote viewing is not a telepathic process. Thus, a viewer’s attention may not necessarily be drawn to the same things the experimenter chooses to focus on, but rather to some other attention-getting object or scene in the vicinity. Obviously, too wide a focus would include too much, making deciding between targets harder in a different way. There is a happy medium between too wide and too narrow which, though difficult to specify with precise selection rules, can easily be learned through experience or in consultation with someone who has such experience. It goes without saying that to maximize chances of success, each target location should be selected to be as uniform within the respective target area itself as it is different from other target settings.

3. Testing a large body of naive subjects may not demonstrate a strong effect, as initial success will vary dramatically across individuals with no or little prior remote viewing experience. Strong results produced by some individuals may be canceled out by the statistical noise of others who don’t yet “get” how to do remote viewing.

4. In line with point 3, the absence of even rudimentary instructions on how one might do remote viewing leaves it up to naive viewers to try to figure out how to do it themselves. This may have a further dampening effect on results, as many novice viewers may not have a grasp on how to put the process into effect, and will find their efforts frustrated and unsuccessful. One would not, for example, present a bicycle to someone unfamiliar with the principles of bicycle riding and then conclude that bicycle riding was impossible if the person fails to successfully ride the bike. Future remote viewing experiments such as this might recommend, or even borrow from, simple remote viewing procedures such as those outlined on the Association’s website at http://www.irva.org/

5. It is unclear in the experimental design what measures have been taken to guarantee that all responses will be authentic (that is, unique and individual). It is technically feasible for groups or persons disenchanted with the purpose of the experiment to “spam” the results with large numbers of randomly chosen responses. This would have the effect of diluting or even completely submerging any real effect that might otherwise emerge. Such a strategy can only work to adversely affect the experiment – it cannot produce artificially inflated results, since that would require a large number of votes for the correct choice, which is not known (other than via ESP) for each trial until after it has been closed and no further responses are possible. In order to avoid this, the website and voting process must be constructive to eliminate the possibility of automated randomized or “spoofed” votes.

One final note related to the experiment but not having directly to do with its conduct: Dr. Wiseman’s statistical assessment (if accurately represented in media articles) that three “hits” of four in the series would yield odds against chance of 1 in 125 may inadvertently overstate the case. After consulting with statistician and IRVA board member Professor Jessica Utts, it seems the actual statistical consequence of three “hits” would yield a more modest (but still significant) odds against chance of 1 in 36. As Dr. Utts observed, "The odds against chance of 1/125 would be appropriate if 3 hits were required in just 3 trials, rather than at least 3 hits in 4 trials."Nothing said here is meant to criticize Dr. Wiseman for undertaking this commendable effort to demonstrate a remote viewing effect. We are pleased to see such research being conducted and stand ready to contribute advice or assistance when invited. We hope our comments above will be useful to future experiments, even if this one should turn out not to be as successful as we might like.
Paul H. SmithPresident, The International Remote Viewing Association
http://www.irva.org/

NewsTwitter Experiment Explores ESP

2009-06-03T06:50:00.000-07:00

By Benjamin Radford, LiveScience's Bad Science Columnist
posted: 01 June 2009 06:13 pm ET

A novel experiment using Twitter by British psychology professor Richard Wiseman, in conjunction with "New Scientist" magazine, is set to be the largest ESP ("remote viewing") experiment in history.

According to Wiseman, this is how it works:
"At 3 PM (GMT) each day, I will travel to a randomly selected location. Once there, I will send a Tweet, asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of my location. Thirty minutes later, I will send another Tweet linking to a Web site that will allow everyone to view photographs of five locations (the actual location and four decoys), think about the thoughts and images that came to them in the 30 minutes before, and vote on which of the five they believe to be the actual target location. If the majority of people select the correct target, then the trial will count as a hit."

The trials will be held this Tuesday through Friday, and Twitterers can participate here.
Previous scientific experiments by the U.S. government failed to find good evidence for psychic powers. Starting in the 1970s, a project called Stargate explored the possibility of using psychic powers to gather military intelligence. The research went on for about two decades until CIA scientists concluded that the psychics did no better than chance, and that psychic information was neither validated nor useful.

Like all experiments, Wiseman's test has inherent limitations. The participants are a self-selected, volunteer subset of Twitter subscribers, and any result may not generalize to the population at large. The experiment cannot (and is not designed to) conclusively prove or disprove the existence of psychic abilities.

Still, thousands of Twitterers are expected to participate, and if nothing else, it is an interesting way to get the public thinking about how scientific methodologies can be applied to paranormal claims.

If the results are positive — that is, the majority of Twitterers correctly identify the locations in three or more of the four trials — that would be an intriguing result that would raise even more questions:

Can the results be replicated, and generalized to other groups in other situations?

Would that pool of Twitter users achieve the same result if they didn't use Twitter?

Do Twitter users somehow have more psychic ability than non-Twitterers, or could Twitter technology itself somehow enhance latent psychic powers?

Since the experiment tests group effects instead of individual ones, how small can the group be to still retain the same level of accuracy? What will Wiseman's test finally prove?

The world will find out June 5, when the results and raw data will be made available to the participants and public.

Benjamin Radford is managing editor of the Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. He questioned Twitter's usefulness in a column last month. His books, films, and other projects can be found on his website.

Twitter's Psychic Experiment

2009-06-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

In the first scientific experiment to be conducted via the social messaging service, experts will investigate "remote viewing" - the psychic ability to identify distant locations.

Members of the public will be asked to "tweet" their impressions of a randomly chosen spot in the UK visited by one of the researchers. Then they will vote for which of five photographs on a website shows where the visitor was standing. The trial will be repeated with visually different locations four times. If at the end of the experiment the votes correctly identify at least three targets, it will support the existence of extra-sensory perception.

Study leader psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman, from the University of Hertfordshire, who specialises in investigating psychic phenomena, said: "Personally, I'm sceptical, but three hits would be against odds of one in 125, which would be quite impressive."

He hopes as many as 10,000 people will take part in the research, being conducted in collaboration with New Scientist magazine. Prof Wiseman will travel to each target location and send a message to thousands of participants to "tweet" their thoughts about his surroundings.
Twenty minutes after sending this message he will transmit another containing a website address on which participants can view photographs of the actual location and four decoys. They will then cast their votes.

"I have staged several mass participation studies over the years, but this is the first to use Twitter," said Prof Wiseman. "The instant nature of tweets allows thousands of people to take part in real time, making it perfect for an extra-sensory perception experiment. If the effect does exist then having so many people participate will help detect it."

Prof Wiseman is not the first scientist to investigate remote viewing. At the height of the Cold War in the 1970s, the CIA spent $20 million (£12.5 million) conducting remote viewing experiments in a real-life case of the "X-files". The "Stargate Project" was aimed at conducting "psychic spying" missions against the Soviet Union.

"The Russians were doing the same thing, and there was evidence from laboratory studies that suggested there might be something going on," said Prof Wiseman. "The CIA just thought it was worth a try and ran the programme for about 10 years."

Remote viewing has been linked to astral projection and telepathy, but no-one knows how it might work. Unlike the CIA, Prof Wiseman will be looking for a group effect rather than individual ability. This is a phenomenon known as "the wisdom of the crowds".

"If you have a jar full of jellybeans and you want to know many are in it, you get the most accurate estimate by averaging a number of different people's estimates," said Prof Wiseman.

The results of the experiment should be known on Friday. Sumit Paul-Choudhury, online editor at New Scientist, said: "There have been mass participation experiments since the start of mass communication and this is the next step.

"If we find some sort of effect then we can get into speculating about how it works."
Anyone can take part in the experiment by visiting the site.

Visit Richard Wiseman's Blog for more details about the experiment which began June 1, 2009. Tune into Twitter at 10am EST to participate in the experiment.

Army Funds ‘Synthetic Telepathy’ Research

2009-05-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

The Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of "synthetic telepathy." But unlike old-school mind-melds, this seemingly psychic communication would be computer-mediated. The University of California, Irvine explains: The brain-computer interface would use a noninvasive brain imaging technology like electroencephalography to let people communicate thoughts to each other. For example, a soldier would "think" a message to be transmitted and a computer-based speech recognition system would decode the EEG signals. The decoded thoughts, in essence translated brain waves, are transmitted using a system that points in the direction of the intended target.

All across the military, there’s interest in translating thoughts into computer code, and vice versa. Darpa-funded researchers have taught monkeys how to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is building binoculars that tap the unconscious mind. Honeywell has built a system that monitors pre-conscious nueral firings, to help pick out targets in satellite imagery. The JASONs, the Pentagon’s premiere scientific advisory board, has warned of the dangers of enemies implanted with brain-computer interfaces. And the Defense Intelligence Agency just released a report, saying the military needs to spend more on neuroscience - up to and including "mak[ing] the enemy obey our commands."

Have You Had a Near-Death Experience?

2009-05-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, our office mates in our building include IANDS, the International Association for Near-Death Studies, Inc. IANDS is embarking on a project which may lead to a television series about near death experiences and their impact on people's lives. They are looking for experiencers who would like to share their stories. We are passing this notice along to you as we believe that many of you may be interested!

IANDS is cooperating with a television production company on a possible TV series about near-death experiences and their impact on people's lives. We are inviting experiencers to consider participating.

The producers are interested in the following types of experience:
· NDE
· Near-death-like experiences
· Shared near-death experiences
· Distressing near-death experiences
· Out-of-body experiences (without other elements of an NDE)
· Tunnel experiences
· Angel experiences
· Light beings experiences
· Light experiences (without other elements of an NDE)
· Life review experiences
· Meetings with dead relatives
· After-death communication
· Apparitions

If you have had an experience like any of these--especially if your life has been strongly affected by it--and would like to have it considered as the basis for an episode, please let IANDS know (see below).

This is a preliminary request for experiences, as there is no guarantee that the series will be picked up for broadcasting. Your willingness to participate does not ensure that your experience will be included, as we cannot guarantee that it will be selected. The producers, not IANDS, will select the accounts they wish to use. If your experience is selected, there is no guarantee that you will appear on camera.

We will review all experience accounts that come to the office. Someone will notify you if the TV producer wants to talk with you. Please DO NOT call the IANDS office to check on your status. If the producer wants to talk with you, you will be notified; if you do not receive a message that the producer wants to talk with you, the producer has decided not to use your experience.

We will post an announcement on the IANDS website when we know whether the series has been picked up for broadcasting.

Here's how to send your experience for consideration:

Send us an email or letter, including these four things:
· your name, address, phone number, and email address if you have one
· a full description of your experience and its impact on your life
· a statement that you agree to having your experience considered for a TV show
· a statement that you agree not to submit your experience to any other TV show unless it is not selected by these producers

If you are using email, send to office@iands.org.

If you use regular mail, send the letter to:

IANDS
2741 Campus Walk Ave
Durham, NC 27705-8878
USA

Be sure to include the description of your experience!

Alexandra Sokoloff reads and signs THE UNSEEN

2009-05-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

- paranormal thriller based on the history and work of the Rhine lab.
Thursday, June 4,

7:30 pm

Quail Ridge Books and Music

Raleigh, NC

(919) 828-1588

We do not normally promote events which are not sponsored by RRC, but this one sounds like so much fun that we wanted you to knowabout it! Acclaimed paranormal suspense author Alexandra Sokoloff http://alexandrasokoloff.com/ (The Harrowing, The Price) has had a longtime fascination with parapsychology and the work of Dr. J.B. Rhine and Dr. Louisa Rhine.

She has incorporated some of the history and work of the Duke parapsychology lab and Dr. Rhine's ESP experiments into her new novel, The Unseen (St. Martin's Press, May 26, 2009).
In this spooky thriller, two Duke psychologists discover a file from a long-buried poltergeist investigation conducted in the 1960's. They decide to take two psychically gifted students into an abandoned Southern mansion to duplicate the experiment, unaware that the entire original research team ended up insane or dead.

Alex will read from and discuss The Unseen at Quail Ridge Books and Music in Raleigh, Contact Quail Ridge Books for more information on this event.
Free; wine and cheese reception.

A word about patients' psychic experiences: Listen by Beth Wechsler

2009-05-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

from American Nurse Today Date: March 2009 Vol. 3 Num. 3

Beth Wechler will be speaking at the Rhine Center (Stedman Auditorium) on June 5th, 2009.

In her dream, a young pediatric nurse answered the phone at the nurses’ station and was told to go to the lobby where a gravely ill patient was being admitted. She went down to find a little boy in blue, pink, and white pajamas. When she looked at the boy, she realized she had cared for him, and she knew he would die from cancer the next day. The boy came gratefully into her arms.
At the hospital, she told her supervisor about her dream. Then the phone rang, and her dream began to unfold. The child was in the hospital lobby, dressed in the blue, pink, and white pajamas. He came into her arms, and by the next day, he was dead.

Challenging assumptions

This nurse had a psychic (extrasensory or psi) experience: precognition in a dream. Such experiences have interested people, especially those who care for the sick and dying, in all cultures throughout history. Psychic events are a topic of vast interest to clinicians and of equally vast silence among them.

Psi phenomena challenge some basic assumptions we make about science. Nurses who talk about these events often risk ridicule: sometimes, science can be just as dogmatic as religion. But ignoring evidence can be just as serious as inventing it. Psychologist Lawrence LeShan said that the refusal of medicine to deal with psychic events is itself a subject worthy of study. (See Science and the unseen in pdf format by clicking the download now button.)

Peace and comfort

What relevance does this have to nursing? When accepted into our belief systems, psi events change our worldview and our understanding of our mind, which contrary to three centuries of medical belief, may be more than just a product of our brains. Virtually all Eastern philosophies understand psi events as the initial stages of awareness of other levels of reality, including what happens to the mind during sleep and the transition to death.

Nurses witness—and should be able to talk about—psi phenomena that occur as patients come close to death. Nurses also should be willing listeners when patients want to discuss psi phenomena. These phenomena include experiences with take-away apparitions, in which someone who is already dead comes to accompany the dying patient through the transitional state between life and death, what Tibetan tradition calls the bardos. Studies in India and the United States suggest that patients who experience take-away apparitions also experience a sense of peace and comfort with dying.

Feeling is believing

While a visiting nurse, Amelia Cabral and a colleague cared for an elderly woman who was dying from breast cancer. The patient lived with her daughter, who was a widow.

Many times, the daughter called to say her mother’s time was near. But when the nurses arrived at the house, the patient would say it wasn’t time yet because her deceased husband hadn’t called. Then, late one night, the patient phoned Amelia to say that her husband had called.

When the nurses met at the patient’s home, they felt a warm, comforting breeze. The patient asked if they could see her husband. They couldn’t. The patient then thanked the nurses for caring about her, said good-bye to her daughter, closed her eyes, and died. At that moment, the breeze quickened, and a gauzy “sense” rose from her. The patient’s daughter and both nurses had the same experience. The nurses said they don’t know what they saw or sensed that night, but it has remained vivid their minds.

Being receptive

How common are these events? Polls conducted in 1984, 1988, and 1989 by the University of Chicago’s National Opinions Research Center suggest that nearly half of Americans report after-death communication from the deceased. These apparitional experiences of continuing contact are reassuring to the bereaved, just as take-away apparitions are reassuring to the dying. Repeated studies also suggest a positive correlation between mental health and extrasensory experiences.

Psychic experiences among patients have a long history. So nurses need to be able to speak to each other about these experiences and listen to patients who describe them. If you’re receptive, you’ll hear some remarkable stories.

Selected references
Dossey L. Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco; 2000.
Feather SR. The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press; 2005.
Mayer EL. Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind. New York, NY: Bantam Books; 2007.
Radin D. Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. New York, NY: Paraview Pocket Books; 2006.

Beth Wechsler is a licensed independent clinical social worker in private practice in Mashpee, Massachusetts. The author of Psychic Moment—Coming to Our Senses, Beth can be contacted at bethwmsw@aol.com.

Remote Viewing Anyone?

2009-04-30T10:11:00.000-07:00

Remote viewing is a controlled form of PSI funtioning that can be learned. Similar to much earlier research on "thought transferrence" by the Rhines, Rene Warcollier and the Sinclairs, what we call Remote Viewing was developed by the US military as a response to similar programs in the Soviet Union. A secret program was created to bring together scientists in the field to develop defenses against foreign "psychic spys" and to establish our own data gathering abilities.

Scientists and military personnel who had been screened for "psychic abilities" were established as a team, and over the decades from the 1970s through the mid 1990s, and under various names and funding sources, the group established protocols for gathering information and for training such skills. Since the projects ended in 1995, and due to declassification of much of the information on the program, many of the former government Remote Viewers have written books, started training programs of their own, and have discussed the science of Remote Viewing in the public media.

Remote Viewing is something you can learn to do, and its a lot of fun. Training is of course available, but free information from books and websites is plentiful, and with some practice you can develop your own Remote Viewing skills.

Benton Bogle works regularly with a website dedicated to learning Remote Viewing, and he says he is shocked almost on a daily basis by the incredible Remote Viewing skills shown by the participants there. The science of Remote Viewing is still quite young, and much is yet to be learned about it, but the techique and process of Remote Viewing is something you can learn with practice.

You can visit the site at Remote Viewing and Dowsing Community RV Web Forum (not affiliated with the Rhine Research Center), or if you are interested in a more hands-on experience, Benton Bogle is organizing a small group of remote viewers to meet regularly for practice at the Rhine Center. See the notice below.

Interested in Remote Viewing Practice?
The Rhine Research Center is considering sponsorship of a Remote Viewing Practice Group. This group would meet regularly at the Rhine Center to do outbounder and other types of Remote Viewing that involve interaction. It would not be necessary to be trained as a Remote Viewer or to follow a particular method to participate. If you are interested in practicing Remote Viewing as a part of a small group of viewers and / or have questions, please contact Benton Bogle by email at bbogle@triad.rr.com. Meetings for the group would be free of charge for RRC members, $10 for non-members.

This Weekend Athena Drewes at the Rhine

2009-04-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Understanding the Psychic Experiences of Childhood:
From Your Own to Your Children’s
a presentation by Athena Drewes PhD, child psychologist/parapsychologist, and RRC Advisory Board member.

Friday April 24th, 2009
7:30 – 9:00pm
at the Stedman Auditorium
Directions

Many adults recall the puzzlement of psychic experiences from their own childhood while others are puzzled as they encounter the paranormal for the first time with their own children. Over the past few years there are increasing reports of children seeing spirits or apparitions. We hear about special psi ability of so-called “Indigo/Rainbow children” and/or of some autistic children. How should adults deal with their own childhood memories? How should parents respond to their children's reports and experiences? And how should children and teens handle their own seeming encounters with the spirit world?

Understanding Childhood Experiences Workshop
a half-day workshop led by Athena Drewes Psy.D., RPT-S
Saturday, April 25th, 2009
10:00am - 2:00pm
at the Rhine Center Library

This half-day workshop is limited to 30 people. A four-hour workshop, including a round-table lunchtime discussion, will allow ample time for experiential exercises for enhancing psi abilities as well as protecting children or adults from any distress accompanying psychic experiences.

Athena A. Drewes, Psy.D., RPT-S, is a licensed child psychologist, parapsychologist and volunteer consultant to the Rhine Research Center and the Parapsychology Foundation on children’s psychic experiences. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Rhine Center. Dr. Drewes has conducted research, written articles and reviews and presented on children’s ESP experiences. She responds to parent and child inquiries regarding children and ESP that come in to the Rhine Research Center and through A&E. She has been featured on the A&E cable shows “Psychic Children” and “Paranormal State”. She has also had her own psychic experiences as a child through adulthood. Her involvement in parapsychology began as a research assistant at the Dream Lab (Parapsychology and Psychophysics Research Laboratory) at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY assisting with dream telepathy experiments with Dr. Stanley Krippner and Charles Honorton.

Dr. Drewes is currently the Director of Clinical Training at a large non-profit multi-service child and family mental health agency in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. Dr. Drewes is the senior author, with Dr. Sally A. Drucker, of the reference work, Parapsychological Research with Children: An Annotated Bibliography. She is also the co-editor and chapter author of five books on play therapy.

Understanding Childhood Experiences Workshop

2009-04-17T18:04:00.000-07:00

Dr. Drewes is currently the Director of Clinical Training at a large non-profit multi-service child and family mental health agency in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. Dr. Drewes is the senior author, with Dr. Sally A. Drucker, of the reference work, Parapsychological Research with Children: An Annotated Bibliography.

Here are some interesting examples of childhood Psi:

“My grandson is 8 years old and he is beginning to ask questions about the shapes and forms he sees more and more. He has been seeing forms since he was younger than a year old. When he was three years old he stated that “there is a little boy that stays behind my door and watches me.” A year after this, while at the grocery store I wrote a check for my purchases. The cashier noticed my address and mentioned that my home had been her grandfather’s house. I asked her if anyone had died in the house, and she said no, but that her grandfather had a 4-year-old boy that had died in a car accident. Coincidence or what? There have been several incidents like this with my grandson. I would appreciate any help or information you can provide me.”

“My name is Suzanne and I am having trouble with the paranormal. It all started when I was six, and ever since then it has gotten harder and harder for me to understand. I am now 14. I see many things including things from the past and things that are to come. Sometimes when I look at a person I see a very faint color around them and I can also tell how a person is feeling. My parents want to send me to a therapist, but I know I am not crazy. Can you help?”

“I am a child therapist and I am seeing a 3 year old girl. Her mother states that she talks to her deceased grandparents and has had other paranormal experiences since birth. She seems to be well adjusted, happy, and developmentally age appropriate. These events are not distressing to her. Are there suggestions as to how to address the mother’s concerns?”

“My daughter, Marlene is 10 years old, and has autism. Her psi experiences began as a toddler. Before she could speak she would point to the ceiling and smile and indicate that she was seeing spirits or shapes. Once she was able to talk she began to say that the shapes were angels. She can also see and communicate on some level with spirits. She says that the spirits appear as ‘thick air’ or create a warm feeling in her body. She loves animals and they all come up to her, even wild ones, and stay by her as if communicating to her.”

“I have a daughter Christina, who is 9. For a couple of months now, she has mentioned seeing a blue light outside of her bedroom, which then moves to her door. It looks as though it is floating. It makes no noise, and it changes shape. Sometimes she sees small gray objects or green and blue ones that are good. Red ones make her uncomfortable. She says she sees the lights once everyone is in bed and the lights are off. She feels they are spirits trying to communicate with her.”

Interview with Dr. Sally Feather-Rhine

2009-04-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

As the eldest daughter of JB and Louisa Rhine, Dr. Sally Feather-Rhine grew up in the world of parapsychology in Durham NC. She worked as a research assistant at the Duke Lab before and after a B.A. from the College of Wooster (1951) and as a researcher at FRNM after a doctorate in psychology (Duke University, 1967). Dr. Feather then worked over 30+ years as a clinical psychologist in mental health and psychiatric clinics and in private practice in North Carolina and New Jersey. Since 1995 she has been active at the RRC in various administrative roles, serving on two different occasions as volunteer Executive Director. Currently she is working on a research grant on the phenomenology of spontaneous PK experiencers. In 2005 she co-authored a book The Gift (St. Martins Press) that is an update of Louisa E. Rhine’s books on spontaneous ESP experiences.

Visit Parapsychology Information Portal to read an interview with Sally Rhine.

The Panel Discussion Between Stacy Horn and Dr. Sy Mauskopf

2009-03-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

March has been a time of celebration at the Rhine as Stacy Horn's new book, Unbelievable, was published on March 10th by Harper Collins. The Rhine gathering on March 20th was a great success, as audience members were granted the dual presence of Stacy Horn and Dr. Sy Mauskopf, whose book on Parapsychology and the Rhine Center, The Elusive Science, was published in 1980. Together, the two books give a comprehensive account of Parapsychology throughout the 1800's, 1900's, and during the last decade. What a treat to see Mauskopf and Horn together comparing notes about their research and demonstrating such complete understanding and respect for the Rhine Center!

Dr. Mauskopf gave us an overview of the field as it came into being and morphed through the decades, noting that while Parapsychology had times of flourishing it also had times of strong opposition by mainstream science. However, even in the times of opposition, he said, there were always "one or two major scientists who defended it." Its "heyday," he said, was the period between 1882-1920, with a flowering of studies and interest in psychical research. 1920-1930, however, was a time of "winding down" as there was a split in the national societies, but 1930-1945 he noted, was a time of renewal in the field, so influenced by J.B. and Louisa Rhine that he called it the "Rhinean Revival." By 1950, Mauskopf said, success had become mixed with the field not "succeeding" as some had hoped yet never fading completely.

Horn picked up where he left off with her book Unbelievable, and during the panel she regaled the audience with stories from her years of research in the Duke archives. Her research, she says, was focused mostly on correspondence among scientists, and she noted that the Rhines were so famous in their time period that whenever anything "paranormal" happened, they were likely to be the first to receive correspondence about it. Horn included many intriguing stories, for example, the famous movie The Exorcist was based on a real-life situation in New Jersey. J.B. Rhine corresponded with the boy's priest, but the family wanted an exorcist, not science. Another notable moment was when Gaither Pratt, a researcher at the Rhine Center, went to Long Island to study a poltergeist case that was stumping the local police. Of 67 events, Pratt found that 17 could not be explained by normal means (things were falling off tables, off walls, etc.). Horn took great pains to interview family members and others who were associated with these stories (members of the police force, for example) to follow up on these stories and give the whole account in her book, rending numerous fascinating accounts of these psi experiences and their aftermath.

The Rhines, with their insistence on research and practicality, became mainstays in a field based on inexplicable yet seemingly undeniable events. Horn mentioned correspondence from such notables as Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Alan Gregg, Alfred P. Sloan, Aldous Huxley, Richard Nixon, Carl Jung, and Chester Carlson, each with his/her own interesting story. Not only were there numerous letters about famous events and people, Louisa Rhine, Horn said, collected an enormous amount of letters from the general public. These letters (and those that are still coming) are a strong source of anecdotal information for the Rhine Center, giving the Rhine one of the largest collections of spontaneous psi occurrences in the United States -- dealing with issues such as clairvoyance, telepathy, clairsentience, animal psi experiences, extraordinary healings, psychokinesis, and dream psi experiences. Horn says that the overriding question that keeps the study and discussion of psi going is, "Is there life after death or not?" As both Horn and Mauskopf's analysis of the history shows, no matter what happens in the field, these types of questions and events will keep us hanging on.

See photos from the reception below.

A Conversation with Donna Gulick

2009-03-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Did you have any PSI experiences as a child or teenager?
In childhood, I talked often to nature spirits (which I called fairies).
As a teenager, while lost in a hailstorm and badly hurt, I had a life-saving visitation from an Angel, which gave me faith and a trust of Spirit that has pervaded my life.

What were the experiences that made you "a believer"?
As an adult of age 32, with a Masters Degree and two decades of full-time work in Speech Pathology, I began to experience healing that flowed through me to others - starting with my husband during his hospitalization. Surgery was averted, and the experience of being in a cocoon of love and warmth and peace that we both received during these "sessions" began to transform our lives.

Within four years, I found myself morphed into an intuitive spiritual counselor. The process began as baby steps, became a fast walk, and then a run that left me breathless. It went like this:

At first, we simply resumed life with three small children, work, and Dave's returned health. However, when one of us was hurt we put hands and intention to healing and marveled at the results.

Three years later, I began to have healing experiences with friends that included information I had no way of knowing. That frightened me and certainly got my attention. I then sat at the typewriter in the early mornings, starting with prayer and asking to receive whatever I needed to know (including whether to turn off this spigot of experiences if it was coming from my ego). I received a teacher in Spirit who came through in meditation and gave me "lessons" in how to listen to Spirit, receive from the highest levels of vibration, avoid spam etc.

I listened, learned and applied these messages to daily life with three small children and my husband, plus part time work.

Was this something that was accepted in your family? How have family members responded to your work as an intuitive counselor?
My husband was supportive when I thought I was crazy. My friends encouraged me when I doubted myself. My rather open-minded birth family was a bit dubious that I could do it, but soon were very excited and asking for help for themselves. If one parent, in particular, didn't like something that came through Guidance, I was told, "You got the wrong guides today."

Have there ever been times when you doubted yourself, your abilities, or even the whole idea of being an intuitive?

When the teacher in Spirit told me to do spiritual intuitive guidance with other people, I argued for several months. Finally, I said, "I'll announce this at two groups - a meditation group and a Course in Miracles Group. If no one comes, I'll know this came from some personality glitch in me. If people come, I'll have to trust that Spirit pouring through me will give them the help they need."

Within three months I needed to quit my other jobs, and do intuitive counseling and healing full time. That was over 26 years ago. I am humbled and thankful every day to be able to love and serve in this way.

Donna can be contacted at http://www.donnaspringgulick.com/

Accessing Your Right Brain for Peace and Security in a Turbulent World

2009-03-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

An experiential evening of training your right-left brain pathways with Donna Spring Gulick, local intuitive counselor

Friday April 3rd 2009
7:30 – 9:00pm
at the Stedman Auditorium

Directions

In our culture dominated by left hemispheric brain functions, we constantly organize, analyze, compare, future and judge. Discover the joy and wonder you'll feel in your right brain's domain.
- Understand the spiritual function of your brain's right hemisphere
- Map your way out of worry, anger, fear and self-defeating thought patterns
- Learn and practice techniques that switch off negative mind-loops
- Shift to right brain's peace and clarity any time, anywhere – instantly

Techniques taught come from Donna's background, and from the renowned Brain Physiologist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who experienced loss and re-building of her left brain, when in her late 30's. Recommended read before or after, Jill's book, My Stroke of Insight or watch the video below.

Donna Spring Gulick, M.A. who began spiritual teaching in her teens, has now served full-time as an intuitive counselor, spiritual director, teacher, healer and speaker for over 27 years. Previously, she worked as a speech pathologist with adult stroke patients and in speech therapy for children. Donna conveys universal truths that serve us in the interweaving of the scientific, the sacred and the practical. She lovingly inspires conscious healing and empowerment on physical, emotional and spiritual levels. Her humorous but deeply inspirational talks and workshops at conferences, churches and universities inspire and motivate people toward personal consciousness transformation. http://www.donnaspringgulick.com/

Stacy Horn Gets Two Thumbs Up from Betty McMahan

2009-03-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

Dear Stacy,

I find that your factual history of Parapsychology is just what I'd hoped it would be. Unbelievable gives a comprehensive and very interesting account of the scientific studies in Parapsychology. In your research, you have dug out details of the Duke Lab's history (many of them almost forgotten by me) that I find fascinating. I am convinced that no one could have done a better job of keeping the facts straight while making the story such an interesting one. I'm sorry to be so long in responding to this much-appreciated copy of your book. I am honored to be mentioned in it (along with having your signature).

Congratulations, Stacy!
Sincerely,

Betty
Dr. Elizabeth McMahan
Dr. McMahan was a staff member of the Duke Parapsychology Lab and originator of the 'Pure Telepathy Test", presenting conclusive evidence for telepathy which could not be explained by remote viewing or clairvoyance.

To watch videos about the early days at the Rhine Research Center click on this link

The Unbelievable (Yet Common) Elusive Science

2009-03-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

Friday, March 20, 2009
6-7:30pm Informal Reception
7:30-9pm Panel Discussion at the Stedman Auditorium Directions
THE UNBELIEVABLE (YET COMMON) ELUSIVE SCIENCE

NYC author Stacy Horn and Duke Professor Sy Mauskopf

Join us at an Informal Reception followed by a Panel Discussion with the engaging authors of two separate books featuring JB Rhine and the early Duke Parapsychology Lab.

Unbelievable, newly published on 3/10/09, is a commissioned book by Harper Collins written by NYC author Stacy Horn for which movie rights have already been signed! See Stacy’s blog on this book at http://www.stacyhorn.com/unbelievable

The Elusive Science was co-authored by popular Duke professor Sy Mauskopf in 1980, from the perspective of an historian of science. Dr. Mauskopf has been a long-time member of the Rhine Advisory Board, and a popular speaker in the Rhine Center Summer School Programs.

Come hear their stories and ask your questions at the Informal Reception in the Stedman Library before the talk or after the Panel Discussion in the Stedman Auditorium.

Rhine Members $10:00 * Non-Members * $15.00 * Students $5:00