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.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
A Case of Deja Vecu
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Secret Service Took Psychic's Advice on Bush Assassination Plot
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.
"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.
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