Author: Stacy Horn

Books and Publications / People in Parapsychology

Dr. Charles Tart is Blogging!

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Obviously I’m a fan of blogs, they’re just more dynamic than websites and I love to reading what’s on the minds of people I admire and enjoy and, hopefully, getting an occasional personal glimpse into their lives. From Dr. Tart:

“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.”

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He’s talking about his new book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together.

And, he just started a new blog. For those of you who are not familiar with Dr. Tart, he is “known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness, particularly altered states of consciousness, as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in parapsychology. His two classic books, Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), were widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.

He is a Core Faculty Member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology … and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California. He consulted on the original remote viewing research at SRI, where some of his work was important in influencing government policy makers against the deployment of the multi-billion dollar MX missile system.” (I edited that from his online bio.)

ESP and other Phenomena / Science Experiments

Win a Copy of Unbelievable

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I took some pictures of the ESP machines at the Rhine ESP/Parapsychology Museum at the Rhine Research Center and I can’t find all my notes!  So I was thinking, that would be a little embarrassing, not being able to properly identify what they are.  And that’s when I decided to make a contest out of it.

I will send a signed copy of my book to the first person who can explain what one or both of these machines are testing exactly and how!  (If one person explains Machine 1 and a different person explains Machine 2, I will send a copy to each.)

Machine 1

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Machine 2

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ESP and other Phenomena / Science Experiments

Testing Groups for ESP

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The scientists at the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory pretty much tested every group they could think of for ESP.  The picture below is from a series they did testing blind children.  The caption reads:  The subject is trying to match sealed ESP cards to key cards with raised symbols.  Rhine’s conclusions from his book Frontier Science of the Mind:

“Groups of blind children have yielded results that compared with those of seeing children of the same age … while no group of any size has been found completely devoid of capacity to demonstrate ESP, at the same time no subdivision of the human species has been found to stand out in any really distinctive way as either possessing superior psi powers or superior control over them.”

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Books and Publications

Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses

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“I have seen such a world where forms and half-made shapes moved and struggled,” Eileen Garrett wrote about the paranormal.

I always loved Eileen Garrett’s descriptions of her abilities, and what it was like for her. The following quote in particular caught my eye because of all that I’ve read recently about the illusion of time:

“I conceive of yesterday, today, and tomorrow as a single curve … time loses reality and the past and present and future are present in one instant … ”

Helix Press has reissued Allan Angoff’s biography, Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses, which I used in my research.

This following quote of hers is interesting because she seems to accept elements from both parapsychological and mainstream ideas about mind:

“If mind exists, (and I believe it to be universal) the shock of separation from the brain must of necessity at such planned deductions, and one can only, within a new ‘vessel’ experience something akin to a dreaming remembrance of things past. … How much is remembered in the new state of consciousness … does the dragon fly remember his form as the chrysalis of yesterday?”

General

Presentation Rescheduled!

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My book presentation that was originally scheduled for this Sunday, June 28, had to be rescheduled for Sunday, September 27, due to an emergency re-wiring of the theatre where the presentation will take place.

I hope people can make the new date!

Once again, please call 646-373-6868 for more info or go here to sign up.

That gives me the rest of the summer to add slides, and figure out more stories to include.

Scientists Comment on Paranormal

Notice from Yale University

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I plan to write a post about the Parapsychology Laboratory Records at the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, and the fact that there is still so much there that is untapped. I couldn’t read it all, and of the hundreds of pages of notes I made to myself about things to follow-up, I couldn’t come close to looking into them all.

For instance, I made a note about a letter J. B. Rhine wrote to J. R. Angell, the president of Yale University. Rhine wrote that he was making a “tentative inquiry” about their Institute of Human Relations and the possibility of working together.  Angell wrote back that “Your extraordinary experimental observations have already attracted our attention and interest.”  And he said he was forwarding Rhine’s letter to the director of the Institute.

Yale physicist Dr. Henry Margenau (pictured above) wrote that effects they were studying were not brain waves or a new energy, and that they needed to strike out and find a new mode of explanation.  “Science cannot close its eye to those things that are not directly perceptible.”

I can’t tell you how many times I read letters to Rhine from scientists I never heard of, only to google them and learn that they had won a Nobel Prize, etc.  There was a lot of hostility in response to their experiments, but there was also a lot of interest.

General

Witch Bottle

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I came across this short article in British Archeology.  The piece is titled, The Bizarrest Bottle Ever Found.  I love stuff like this.  What is in there?? From the article:

“Witch bottles were commonly buried to ward off spells. Some 200 have been found in Britain, most of them glazed jars made in the late 16th or 17th centuries. Not one, however, was still sealed when it came to be analysed. Until now.

“We report the discovery and analysis of a witch bottle from Greenwich that had its contacts intact – and its cork in. Inside were bent nails and pins, a nail-pierced leather “heart”, finger nail clippings, navel fluff, hair, human urine and brimstone. Analysis of the urine indicated a smoker, and the state of the nail clippings a person of some social standing.”

Okay, ew.  But not too ew.