Books and Publications – Page 2

EdgeScience and Robert Lanza

March 19, 20100

edge
The second issue of EdgeScience is out. You can download it for free here. There’s an interesting article about healing with intention by William F. Bengston.

I also wanted to talk about Robert Lanza who is going to be on Coast to Coast on March 26th. I read Lanza’s essay A New Theory of the Universe when it came out a couple of years ago in American Scholar and I was very excited by it. I tried to find out what kind of reputation Lanza had. Was he respected? He also has a book which came out last April, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the Universe. I’m curious what the reception has been to this as well. (I’m guessing the scientific community was generally negative about it.) I need to get a hold of a copy of this and read it.

News and Articles

February 8, 20100

louisa
I think I have The Daily Grail to thank for bringing my attention to a British Journal of Psychiatry report that auditory hallucinations in children may be common and not a sign of mental illness.

I’ve said this before, but had science paid attention to the discoveries of Dr. Louisa Rhine we’d be fifty years ahead of where we are now on this subject! (That is Louisa Rhine in the photograph.)

I also want to link to a couple of interesting pieces. I’d love to get some feedback to this first one from some parapsychologists.

It’s an interview with Dr. Michael Persinger, and the headline reads: Neuroscience Researcher and Laurentian University professor, Dr. Michael Persinger, demonstrates telepathy under laboratory conditions.

The second is an interesting article called, Not Your Daddy’s Team: The Queer Side of the Paranormal.

A New Magazine: EdgeScience

November 16, 2009November 16, 20090

edge
I’m so excited about this new magazine EdgeScience! And it’s coming out from the Society for Scientific Exploration. You can download the first issue for free.

There’s an article about the Global Consciousness Project by Roger D. Nelson that I look forward to reading. Consciousness is one of the areas I’m most curious about.

The article has a great Pierre Teilhard de Chardin pull quote. “It is our duty—as men and women—to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are collaborators in creation of the Universe.”

(Brief aside: I once did a piece for NPR about the Vatican’s search for a patron saint for the internet. A lot of people wanted Pierre Teilhard de Chardin because of his ideas about the Noosphere, and I did too, but he wasn’t eligible because he is not, and likely never will be canonized a saint.)

Here’s why I think this magazine is good news. I was asked to write a “PS” section for the paperback edition of my book. One of the things I go into briefly is the loss to science when anomalies are dismissed. I used the discoveries about audio hallucinations made by Dr. Louisa Rhine as an example. Had the scientists of Dr. Louisa Rhine day paid attention to her papers the recent “discoveries” being made in this area today—that people hear voices more than we knew, and that it isn’t necessarily a sign of mental illness—would have begun fifty years ago and we would be that much further along in understanding what is happening and why.

It reminds me of this professor at Hunter who once got up at one of J. B. Rhine’s lectures and denounced him. Rhine kept his cool and invited the professor, Dr. Bernard Reiss, to try the experiments himself. Reiss did and got statistically significant results. Later, at an APA conference, Dr. Reiss was criticized by a Dr. Britt for publishing his results so soon. Reiss stood and said:

“I undertook the experiment as a way of demonstrating to my classes that ESP did not occur. I did not succeed in that,” he told the crowd. “I do not know whether Dr. Britt believes in throwing away good data just because he doesn’t precisely understand the full implications of that data, but I felt they should be reported.”

A new publication to report findings that would otherwise be ignored or belittled is something to celebrate. So check out EdgeScience!

A Few Things …

October 31, 2009November 11, 20092

queerhaunt1
There’s a few things I wanted to post about today. First, this new book, Queer Hauntings: True Tales of Gay and Lesbian Ghosts by Ken Summers. So many ghost books seem to just retread the same material we’ve heard about again and again, so it’s great to see something that looks so completely new! Also, I addressed this a couple of times in my book, but not in depth and I hope Ken gets more into it in his, but there’s a connection, at least some of the time, between the paranormal and sex. You can visit Ken’s blog here.

Second, I went to Michael Jawer’s lecture about his new book (with Marc Micozzi, M.D., Ph.D.), The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, and I was really impressed. I mean really seriously impressed. J. B. Rhine and the scientists at the lab (and Eileen Garrett) recognized that emotion was a factor in their ESP experiments. Years later physicist Freeman Dyson went so far as to say that he believed ESP is real, but would be forever out of reach of science because “The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.” I haven’t read the book yet, but it focuses on the science of emotion. Which, by the way, Jawer said was not even a valid area of study until recently, but apparent now it’s all the rage. We really need like a grand unification theory of emotion, consciousness, the body and the brain, and it looks like this book is a start. There’s a website for the book here.

Last! The New York Post sent a couple of ghost hunters to the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the site of a famous haunting (which I’ve written about, too). One of the investigators I know, Dan Sturges, who hosted a lecture of mine recently.

I wanted to recommend checking out the video of their visit. It’s fun! And they got an EVP! I think the link for that may only be in the article which you can find here.

New Book from ICRL Press

August 13, 2009August 13, 20092

filters
The Rhines always felt that the answer to telepathy would be found in a better understanding of consciousness. When I talked to Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of Princeton’s PEAR laboratory, now the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, they talked about information filters and the need for science to incorporate an information field theory. Their ideas felt like a natural progression of the Rhine’s thinking.

From the email about Filters and Reflections: Perspectives on Reality: “This new book is a series of essays related and responding to the PEAR laboratory publication, Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality. This anthology presents an assortment of perspectives on how consciousness creates its experiential reality through an array of subjective “filters” by which “we endeavor to infer, either intuitively or analytically, composite functional models of our world and of ourselves.” Taken together, the individual contributions serve as an array of lenses that amplify the seminal essay.”

The Unseen by Alexandra Sokoloff

July 29, 2009July 29, 20092

unseen
I wanted to post about this book even though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I just know that I’m not going to be able to get to it for a while and I wanted to let people know about it in the meantime because it sounds really clever to me.

It’s a work of fiction that uses the former Duke Parapsychology Lab as a jumping off point. Interesting, right? Here is what Publisher’s Weekly said:

“Sokoloff keeps her story enticingly ambiguous, never clarifying until the climax whether the unfolding weirdness might be the result of the investigators’ psychic sensitivities or the mischievous handiwork of a human villain.”

The book is centered around a fictional poltergeist case from 1965. If you go to her website here you can read an excerpt.

Dr. Charles Tart is Blogging!

July 4, 2009November 11, 20090

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.”

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.)