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Media Watch for January 2006 (Issue 50)
Thoughts for the New Year: Last year at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in New York City, the APA’s, Osker Pfister Award Lecture was entitled, “Dialogue from the Rims of the Grand Canyon: On Bridging the Post-Freudian Chasm Between Religion and Psychiatry.” Elizabeth S. Bowman, M.D., of Indiana University, spoke about how Freud’s theories on religion created a Grand Canyon of eroded trust between psychiatry and religion…. “Freud depicted religion as inherently pathological and inconsistent with psychological maturity. Yet many of us in the field of emotional and psychological well-being have felt the opposite. We have been aided and guided in our work by spiritual concepts from both ancient and more recent traditions.
“Some of us, myself included, entered the field of medicine for religious or spiritual reasons. My Jewish background taught me, ‘If a person saves one life, it is as if he has saved an entire world. And if a person destroys one life, it is as if he has destroyed the entire world.’ (Mishnah, Sanhedrin) This sentiment, embodying all that really matters in the universe, continues to be my touchstone. With its simple eloquence, this lesson reminds us that every life is of infinite value and deserves to be nurtured. It advises us to respect the internal world of the self, as that is where much of real consequence in this world resides. It extols the virtue of self-love and love of others. It instructs us on how to find meaning and fulfillment in life: Save yourself and save others, love yourself and love others, grow yourself and help others to do the same.
“What ingredient is most crucial to our healing? Our belief in the power of the possible. We need to keep searching for those providers, partners, mentors and guides who nurture us. We must use what makes sense as long as it makes sense to us, continue to ask for help and never allow ourselves to give up. Where there’s a will to transform a life, there’s a way to do it. Nurturing spirit, in this sense, saves lives. By working together to build bridges between disciplines rather than canyons; we can better save the world, one life at a time.” From: The International Journal of Healing and Caring “Building Bridges, Saving Lives” by Eve A. Wood, MD www.ijhc.org
The typical IADC involves the patient reporting having seen a deceased person and that deceased person having told him or her that everything is okay and not to grieve. In a number of cases, the deceased person relates information previously unknown to the patient. Even atheists and skeptics who underwent the therapy experienced an after-death communication.
Spirituality in America: The cover of last summer’s double issue of Newsweek showed a woman with arms raised over her heard and a big headline that read, “Spirituality In America.” A side box stated, “Our Faith Today, What We Believe, How We Pray, Where We Find God.” The issue included over twenty pages focusing on the diversity of religions in America, along with lots of statistics from a Newsweek/Beliefnet Poll. To the question, “What is your current religion” 33% responded that they were Evangelical Protestant; 25% responding Non-evangelical Protestant; 22% Catholic; 5% other Christian; 1% Jewish; 1% Muslim: 3% other non-Christian; 6% Atheist/agnostic/no religion and 4% Religion undesignated. One in five taking the poll said that they had switched religions as an adult and eight in ten surveyed believe that more than one faith can be a path to salvation. From: Newsweek,August29/September5, 2005, Volume CXLVI, No.9/10
Athletes and Meditation: Last year, Ray Giacoletti found success and turned his Eastern Washington basketball team around by teaching his team to meditate. The team recovered from two late-season overtime losses and made it to the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Now Giacoletti uses mediation with the Utah Utes before the game, [and as of this writing,] they were on an eighteen game winning streak. “We all kind of had a little chuckle,” Guard, Tim Drisdom, said. “I think we were all just kind of, ‘Oh we’re going to meditate now? Lights off?’ But we’re not going to stop doing it now.” From: “Meditation and visualization Get Utes’ Heads into the Game,” by Michael C. Lewis, Salt Lake Tribune March 2, 2005.
Spiritual Meditation: We all know that meditation can reduce heart rate, lower blood pressure and improve mental health but a surprising new study shows that spiritual meditation is better. Participants in the study by Amy Wachholtz and Kenneth Pargament at Bowling Green State University, where trained in either spiritual mediation or secular mediation. The training was identical except that the spiritual group was instructed to concentrate on a phrase such as, “God is joy” or “God is love,” whereas the secular group was instructed to concentrate on a phrase such as, “I am joyful” or “I am content. These groups were compared to a control group that was taught to relax and avoid stressful thoughts. All practiced their technique for twenty minutes a day for two weeks.
The spiritual meditation group reported lower anxiety, more positive mood and greater spirituality than the secular mediation and control groups. Also, the spiritual meditation group was able to withstand holding their hand in icy water (a measure of pain tolerance) for twice as long as the other participants. From: BPS Research Digest Issue 51, www.researchdigest.org.uk, Wachholtz, A.B. & Pargament, K.I., “Is spirituality a critical ingredient of meditation? Comparing the effects of spiritual meditation, secular meditation, and relaxation on spiritual, psychological, cardiac, and pain outcomes.” Journal of Behavioural Medicine.
Social Parapsychology: Parapsychology has typically focused on individual psychic experiences. Investigating collective psychic experiences, known as social parapsychology, is an interesting idea, but up to now, it has been difficult to do. With the advent of the Internet, research in this area is now taking place. Online psi tests have collected immense amounts of data. As of the first quarter of 2005 the psi games at www.gotpsi.org, hosted by the Boundary Institute, and those at www.psiarcade.com, hosted by the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), had generated over seventy million individual trials from nearly 300,000 people worldwide.
Institute of Noetic Sciences, Senior Scientist, Dean Radin, looked at all online precognition trials from September 2000 through June 2003 and developed an automated concept-matching technique to form an average score indicating how closely the words used on a daily basis contained terrorism related concepts. Radin writes, “At first glance, these scores appeared to fluctuate randomly … On close inspection I found something rather unusual. Rather than increase in value, as might be predicted if lots of people were suddenly having premonitions of disaster, a few days before 9/11 the scores dropped to their lowest point in the three years of data examined.” Radin found that the odds of this happening were 3,300 to 1, which meant that people were significantly avoiding concepts associated with terrorism just prior to the catastrophe. “Many people unconsciously began to sense trouble brewing, but there was no context for those feelings so they were actively repressed.”
Our Pets Survive: We all know that our pets do survive just as we do but it is always nice to hear about the proof. Patti Newell wrote to us saying, “Two years ago at Lily Dale, one of the mediums was trying to give me a greeting from a departed loved one but she was struggling with it. She kept saying that the energy was very enthusiastic but there was something odd about it that she didn’t understand and finally she said that she got the name “Sandy” from my father’s side of the family. I laughed out loud and explained that I could understand why the energy felt odd, as Sandy was my father’s favorite dog. She laughed and said that would explain why she wanted to wriggle her backside every time she said “enthusiastic”!
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Induced
After-Death Communication: 
