|
Media Watch for March 2006 (Issue 52)
The Parapsychology Foundation: In 2005, The Parapsychology Foundation held their first conference in 13 years. It was in Charlottesville, Virginia and the conference was titled, “The Study of Mediumship: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2005)” Christine Simmons attended the conference and did a review for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) Paranormal Review magazine. She wrote, “Presentations explored the following areas: the history of mediumship and its impact on culture and society; the survival question (in particular, whether a discarnate entity continues to exist post-mortem); the correlates of mediumship experiences (for example, altered states of consciousness and dissociation); the physiology of mediumship (in experiences of both physical and mental mediumship); and finally, the potential applicability of the mediumship and associated experiences (in terms of mental health, investigation of apparent haunting cases, and in understanding more about creativity and the creative process).
We thought you might like a quote that came out of Etzel Cardeña’s talk on how identity and dissociation can inform us about mediumship. ‘Dissociation’ refers to a lack of integration or association between memories or identity, which is often considered pathology in mainstream psychiatry. In her talk Cardeña said “In a Western materialistic worldview, where consciousness is only matter, anomalous identity experiences have to be explained as something to do with pathology. However… research by Bouruignon suggesting that 74% of societies believe that spiritual forces can affect personality and well-being! As such, the materialist-Western perspective is actually the minority position.” Parapsychology Still Shut-out: In the foreword of the book Parapsychology in the Twenty-first Century, Brian Josephson notes, “By rights, parapsychology should by now have become a conventional scientific field, and yet parapsychology’s claims are still not generally accepted.” Josepheon believes that scientists are not swayed by evidence for the paranormal because their mind-sets are “not primarily a matter of science.” Henry Sidgwick complained about this same state of affairs in 1882. In the opening chapter of Parapsychology in the Twenty-first Century, Dean Radin states that Sidgwick’s suggested strategy of burying skepticism under a heap of facts has had little effect. Radin is hopeful that, “new views of time and causality in physics, and the adoption of modern physics into the biological sciences, will begin to make some aspects of parapsychology much more palatable to the mainstream.” From: a book review of Parapsychology in the Twenty-First Century by John Poynton, Journal of the Society for psychical Research, V 69.3 # 880 July 2005 pg153-157
Six Decades of Research: Ganzfeld is the most popular extrasensory perception (ESP) experiment. It involves covering the subject’s eyes with ping-pong ball halves and shining a red light at them, while white noise is played through headphones. Meanwhile, in another area, a “sender” concentrates on a “target image” and tries to transmit it telepathically to the subject. Later, the subject is asked to pick the target image from a selection of images.
By chance, ganzfeld subjects should guess the right target 25% of the time. In fact, the overall success is slightly more than 33%. Statistically, that’s a very big discrepancy, and taken at face value, ganzfeld results should form almost incontrovertible evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena (psi). However, after years of tests this is not the case, and the results of three decades of experiments are still being criticized by the skeptics.
Dean Radin, director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory (CRL) in California, believes that skeptics are often out of touch with modern science. Many pro-psi researchers feel that science is undergoing a paradigm shift during which acceptance of psychic phenomena will eventually become the norm among scientists. From: the Sunday Herald, April 03, 2005, “Parapsychology: Fact of séance fiction?,” by Adrian Turpin Scottish Universities have the Right Idea: The universities of Strathclyde and Paisley are offering students a psychic, paranormal and consciousness studies course. One of the topics within the course is “contacting the dead.” The students also watch a psychic at work. The instructor, Dr. Jackie Jones-Hunt, is quoted as saying, “It’s fascinating what it reveals about life. The course is quite spiritual and looks at life beyond this one.” From: Daily Record, “Psychic Studies” at www.dailyrecord.co.uk
After Death Communication (ADC): As part of a larger research study on “Comparing Grief Reactions and Religious/Spiritual Coping Methods Among Cancer, AIDS-Related and Suicide Bereavement,” Dr. James Houck asked 162 bereft people to report if they had experienced specific types of ADC, as it related to their most recent death of a loved one. Houck wanted to know if ADC experiences were random or purposeful to specific types of populations or bereavement groups. A frequency analysis indicated three common themes: Universality, i.e., ADC’s appear to cut across lines of gender, age, religious preference, education levels, time since the death, and types of death; Multiplicity, people typically experience more than one type of ADC by the same loved-one on different occasions; and Exclusively, the majority of ADC experiences are experienced without the assistance of a third-party (e.g., medium, spiritualist, shaman, etc.). From: “The Exclusive, Universal, and Multiple Experiences of After Death Communication” By James A. Houck, Ph.D. www.adcrf.org/houck_research.htm
Time Travel: An article by Mark Buchanan for the NewScientist.com news service discussed some of the questions that surround the idea of time travel. Buchanan writes, “The laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness inherent in laws of quantum physics.” Physicists Daniel Greenberger of the City University of New York, and Karl Svozil of the Vienna University of Technology in Austria, have shown that the most basic features of quantum theory may ensure that if we do learn how to go back in time we will be unable to alter the past. We will not go into the laws of physics that they say would prevent this but Greenberger states, “If you travel into the past quantum mechanically, you would only see those alternatives consistent with the world you left behind you.” Online Telepathy Experiment: Rupert Sheldrake has an improved version of the online telepathy test now up on his website at www.sheldrake.org. If you experience knowing who is on the phone before you pick it up or think of someone and then receive an email from them, your participation could help researchers learn whether these things are just a matter of coincidence or if telepathy is involved. Beast gets New Number: We all know that the Bible was written by many different authors over an extended period of time. We also know that the Bible has gone through countless translations. Now, research by Bible scholars in England using modern technology to search 400,000 bits and pieces from writings that are 2,200 years old, are suggesting that the Number of the Beast, as described in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations is not 666 but instead 616.
The writings were originally discovered in 1895 outside the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Much of it had been damaged and discolored but modern imaging is shedding new light on the text believed to have been written by the apostle John. Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University said, “Scholars have argued for a long time over this, and it now seems that 616 was the original number of the beast.” From: Fate Magazine
July 2005 “I see by the Papers” by Phyllis Galde. |
|
|||||||
 |
|
|
Donate to ATransC | Pledge | Top | Contact the Association TransCommunication |
|
|
| |
atransc2009-banner.gif){kind=spacer}
