Wanted: Good Psychics
If you have had a psychic reading from someone who proved to be particularly accurate and helpful, please take note. You may nominate this person to serve on A.R.E.'s panel of professional psychics at the annual Edgar Cayce Legacy conference on psychic development. If you yourself are a psychic and wish to be considered for the panel, please submit your own name.
Panelists provide psychic readings to the conference participants as part of the training process of the conference. Professional psychics who have served on this panel in the past have received an honorarium and their hotel lodging expenses paid during the conference. Afterwards, their names are added to a list of participating psychics, which is made available to people who call the A.R.E. requesting information about resources for psychic readings.
For further information about the selection process, see www.creativespirit.net/researchonpsychics
Please submit nominations (name, mail address, phone, email) by email only to henry.reed@atlanticuniv.edu
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Meditation Saves Heating Bills
Through meditation, it is possible to raise your body temperature and withstand extreme cold. That’s one implication of Wim Hof’s record breaking feat. He sat totally submerged in ice for one hour and twelve minutes, using Tantric meditation techniques. The other implication is there’s no telling what someone will do to get into the Guinnes book of world records.
Source: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/22870215/
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Harvard Researchers Scan Brain for ESP
In an attempt to determine whether or not ESP exists in the brain, researchers at Harvard University set up a telepathy experiment involving pairs of emotionally or biologically related persons (spouses, twins, siblings). The “sender” looked at a photograph while the “receiver” guessed which of two photos the partner was sending. During this process, the researchers maintained an MRI brain scan of the receiver’s brain to determine if there was any difference between brain events for correct and incorrect responses. The results, reported in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, indicated only a 50% correct response rate, exactly at chance levels. Both correct and incorrect responses evidenced identical brain events, leading the researchers to conclude that ESP does not exist. Other researchers are certain to object to their conclusion.
Source: For a description and commentary on this study, go to http://publicparapsychology.blogspot.com/2008/01/guest-blog-using-brain-imaging-as.html
To download a .pdf of the original article, click here!
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Soulmate Project Initiated on Internet
If you are looking for your soulmate, or wish to join other searchers who are exploring methods for attracting one’s soulmate, you may wish to examine the new project set up on beliefnet.com. The project was initiated by Rev. Laurie Sue Brockway, a past contributor to Venture Inward. She reported that the project grew out of many years as a relationship columnist, coach and wedding officiant, working with singles and couples to get ready for love. The project is designed to bring some meaningful and thoughtful dialog to the topic of finding and identifying true love. While the members are mostly soulful singles, Rev. Brockway invites engaged couples to join in the conversation and share their love stories as an inspiration!
For further information, go to http://community.beliefnet.com/soulmate
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Scientific Conference Held on Afterlife
Close to two hundred folks attended a unique conference held in San Francisco and featuring world renown Psi investigators from the academic world sharing evidence of the afterlife. As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was some spooky ghost stories as well as deep discussions about whether or not it is really possible to prove the existence of the afterlife using methods here in the material world. The event was sponsored by the Forever Family Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to the study of the afterlife to help grieving loved ones.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
One doesn't typically get the chills during a PowerPoint presentation in a well-heated conference room. But ghost stories were the hot topic at a two-day event in San Francisco's Cowell Theater billed as the first scientific conference on the afterlife for a general audience.
Take, for example, a tale spun by "Professor Paranormal" Loyd Auerbach, a former teacher in the now-closed parapsychology department of Pleasant Hill's John F. Kennedy University, about a ghost named Lois.
The story is set in the mid-'80s, when a family moved to an old Victorian house in Livermore. Soon after settling in, they became aware of a ghost named Lois, the former owner of the house, who was developing a relationship with the 12-year-old son. The boy told his family that he spoke to Lois daily. "Apparently," Auerbach said, "Lois even helped him with his homework."
Auerbach was intrigued. He and two students piled into a car with some rudimentary recording equipment and headed to Livermore, casually discussing stuff like one student's former dance career and Auerbach's thoughts on purchasing a new car. When they got to the house, they met the boy. He said Lois was distressed. They had just watched "Ghostbusters" on television together, and she was worried they'd bring equipment to vaporize her. Auerbach assured him this wasn't the case. Well, the boy said, then Lois wants to know whether the student would continue dancing and what color car Auerbach wanted. They were floored.
Auerbach said he checked the tape - the three didn't mention anything they had discussed in the car with the boy. He also checked the car for bugs. Nothing. The story, from Lois, was that she had been nervous about their visit and didn't believe they wouldn't try to hurt her, so she rode with them in the car. Auerbach and his team also investigated details of Lois' life relayed by the preteen. It all checked out.
Auerbach holds a master's degree in parapsychology, has written seven books on the subject and has been a fixture on the paranormal lecture and television circuits for more than a decade. He - and several other speakers at the conference, titled Investigations of Consciousness and the Unseen World: Proof of an Afterlife - exist in a strange professional realm that encompasses rigorous academic training, spiritualism and sometimes fraud.
But the other academics at the conference didn't lack for degrees. There was Dean Radin, who began his career in electrical engineering and cybernetics at the University of Illinois before moving on to psychic phenomena at the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University and the University of Nevada. Also represented were Gary E. Schwartz, a Harvard-educated, former Yale professor who now teaches psychiatry, psychology, medicine, neurology and surgery at the University of Arizona, and University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies researchers Dr. Jim Tucker and Dr. Bruce Greyson.
These academics take their paranormal work seriously; they also risk ridicule on campus and struggle to find sources of funding to investigate what happens after we die. One of the issues they face is whether an afterlife is provable by scientific method. Some, like Julie Beischel, who co-founded Arizona's Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, think it is.
"This is how science works," Beischel said. "There's a question and science investigates it. You can't draw a line and say, no, that's outside of science. Science doesn't have any boundaries in what it can investigate."
The mood at the death-centered event was anything but grim. Between presentations the 170 or so attendees chatted in the small foyer of Fort Mason's Cowell Theater. The crowd displayed certain Northern Californian traits - purple was a favorite color, scarves and cloaks abounded, and at least one person addressed the conference topic sartorially, with a sweatshirt that proclaimed, "I've Had A Difficult Few Past Lives."
For all the hugs and smiles and the scientifically coded words and acronyms - "NDE" means "near death experience" and "OOB" stands for "out-of-body experience" - many people had a simple reason for attending: grief.
The Forever Family Foundation, the New York nonprofit that sponsored the conference and that promotes scientific inquiry into the afterlife, was started by grief-stricken parents, Bob and Phran Ginsberg, whose 15-year-old daughter, Bailey, died in 2002. Bob Ginsberg, who works in the insurance business, said that until his daughter's death he never contemplated the paranormal or the possibility of an afterlife.
"The morning of Sept. 2, 2002, Phran woke me up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. She was white as a ghost, and said, 'Something horrible is going to happen today,' " Ginsberg said in a phone conversation from his home in Oceanside, N.Y. "Long story short, my son and daughter were in a car accident that night, and my daughter passed away.
"Months later, when the shock wears off, I wondered, 'What happened? Was that precognition? Someone sending a message?' At the time I wasn't open to such talk, but logically how do you explain it?
"I needed evidence. I needed to hear from scientists and researchers." His foundation now has 3,000 members.
Forever Family Foundation member Diane Kaspari of Portola Valley attended the conference with her husband, Bill. They lost their son in a car crash when he was in college. After that happened, she said she started researching, reading and paying attention to "lots of things that weren't pure coincidence."
"The night he died, I was crying terribly. I lay down and thought, 'Where are you?' " she remembered, "and then I felt this incredible warmth, and I heard him - it wasn't an actual voice, but a telepathic one - say, 'It's OK, Mom, it's no big deal. I'm still here.' It was so perfect. That's exactly how he talked."
Scientists being scientists, no one stated outright at the conference that an afterlife had been proved, and no one seemed interested in espousing any particular vision of it. Religious views were never mentioned.
The conference topics - from ghosts, to near-death experiences, to an especially interesting presentation on reincarnation reports from children - were designed to explore the disconnect between the "mind" and the "brain." If one could be shown to operate without the other, such as a brain-dead person who was resuscitated and then offered details of a hospital scene or a particularly well-documented reincarnation - then a case could be made for consciousness existing outside of the physical body.
Greyson, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia's department of psychiatric medicine, related a case where a patient was put under anesthesia for brain surgery and the brain drained of blood to the point where no brain waves were detectable. After the operation, the patient reported on aspects of the surgery in impossible detail.
In another case, Greyson said a patient whose heart stopped beating claimed to have an out-of-body experience while technically dead. The patient said while floating above the hospital, she saw a red shoe on a ledge of the hospital building, far from the room. Sure enough, a nurse recovered a red shoe from the unlikely spot.
But for as much anecdotal evidence and data as the presenters gave, there was recognition that believing in the paranormal is difficult without a direct experience.
"I feel sorry for the skeptics," said Kaspari. "They're the ones who've already made up their mind."
weblink: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/29/DDNEUL5LD.DTL
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Consciousness Key to Evolution
How was it possible for so many science fiction writers of the past to predict developments in the modern world? Was it just a case of random thoughts that proved correct, or a creative extrapolation to the future? While the second law of thermodynamics require that the universe is constantly heading toward chaos, theoreticians at the Physics-Intution-Application consortium speculate that it must be consciousness that organizes the universe against the otherwise chaotic trend. David Pruett, a mathematician at James Madison University, has recently published an article describing how evolution uses the chaotic tendency to create new forms of life. It is similar to how personal crises provide opportunities for new growth. Go to creativespirit.net/psiresearch/futureconsciousness.htm for a compendium of links to information on chaos and the future of consciousness.
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Investors Make Money with Remote Viewing
How often have you heard the remark, “If there was such a thing as psychic ability, folks would be making millions of dollars with it.” Well, folks have been making money, perhaps not millions, but enough to reward those who are skilled in a particular type of remote viewing. At a recent conference of the International Association of Remote Viewing, Marty Rosenblatt presented the results of his “investment club.” Over a period of three years, the accuracy rate of their members were only eight percent above chance levels, yet that small difference enabled them to double their investments.
Web link: http://p-i-a.com/Magazine/Issue30/Connections_30.html and
http://p-i-a.edu/IRVAconfLasVegas_Oct2007_files/frame.htm
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Time is Accelerating
Did you ever get the feeling that time is speeding up, making you hurry faster and faster, feeling farther and farther behind? According to some interpretations of the Mayan calendar, as we approach the year 2012, the end date of their calendar, each successive cycle of time (termed heavens and underworlds) happens in half the amount of time as the previous one. Evidence that time is indeed speeding up, accelerating even, has been compiled by James Gleick in his book Faster: The acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon). Although not as metaphysically oriented as the interpreters of the Mayan calendar, the book discusses such accelerating realities as email, caffeine, 24 hour news cycles, and the microwave ovens, to name but a few of the items today’s culture takes for granted but which makes our life run faster.
Sources:
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The Smell of Fear is Contagious
Another follow up to our coverage concerning Edgar Cayce’s statement that the sense of odor has the most powerful effect upon us than any other sense function is a report on an ongoing investigation by the U.S. military to harness the pheromone (odor chemical) associated with human fear. One line of investigation is to use armpit odors from folks about to jump out of a plane for a skydiving experience to isolate the fear pheromone. One application of this research is to assess potential soldiers’ fitness for duty by measuring the presence of the pheromone under stress conditions. Another area of application is to spray the enemy with the pheromone, for research suggests that the fear induced by this odor is very quickly contagious.
Source: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/pentagon-resear.html
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Shaking is Good Medicine
Energy medicine often makes reference to the vibratory qualities of various healing remedies. It may very well be that literal vibration, as in shaking, has a healing effect. In his book Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement (Destiny Books), Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., of the Institute of Religion and Health, Texas Medical Center, Houston, compiles the history of physical shaking as a healing modality. Besides describing brain research that compares the healing potential of quiet meditation and ecstatic shaking, he also describes the use of this type of healing ecstasy among the original Quakers and Shakers, as well as among indigenous peoples.
Weblink: http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/NMagazine/issue.php?id=72
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Walking is Good for Thinking
Walking is not only good exercise, it stimulates the brain and helps with problem solving. According to recent research on the subject of “embodied cognition,” we think with our bodies as well as our minds. In one study, for example, conducted by Arizona State University psychology professor Arthur Glenberg, it was found that children are more likely to solve mathematics problems if they are told to gesture with their hands as they think through the problem, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal.
WHEN YOU READ something confusing, or work a crossword puzzle, or try to remember where you put your keys, what do you do with your body? Do you sit? Do you stand? Do you pace? Do you do anything with your hands? Do you move your eyes in a particular pattern?
How you answer questions like these, it turns out, may determine how long it will take for you to decipher what you're reading, solve your puzzle, or get your keys back.
The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking. Another recent study suggested that stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving. And in one study published last year, subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.
The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is "embodied cognition," and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.
"It's a revolutionary idea," says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. "In the embodied view, if you're going to explain cognition it's not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what's going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what's going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment."
Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin's Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, "Ago ergo cogito": "I act, therefore I think."
The emerging field builds on decades of research into human movement and gesture. Much of the earlier work looked at the role of gestures in communication, asking whether gesture grew out of speech or exploring why people gestured when they were talking on the telephone.
But today, neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers are making much bolder claims. A few argue that human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body. If we didn't walk upright, for example, or weren't warm-blooded, they argue, we might understand these concepts totally differently. The experience of having a body, they argue, is intimately tied to our intelligence.
"If you want to teach a computer to play chess, or if you want to design a search engine, the old model is OK," says Rolf Pfeifer, director of the artificial intelligence lab at the University of Zurich, "but if you're interested in understanding real intelligence, you have to deal with the body."
. . .
Embodied cognition upends several centuries of thinking about thinking. Rene Descartes, living in an age when steam engines were novelty items, envisioned the brain as a pump that moved "animating fluid" through the body - head-shrinkers through the ages have tended to enlist the high-tech of their day to describe the human cognitive system - but the mind, Descartes argued, was something else entirely, an incorporeal entity that interacted with the body through the pineal gland.
While a few thinkers, most notably the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the 1940s, challenged Descartes' mind-body separation, it remained the dominant model up through the 20th century, though its form evolved with the times. After the development of the modern computer in the years after World War II, a new version of the same model was adopted, with the brain as a computer and the mind as the software that ran on it.
In the 1980s, however, a group of scholars began to contest this approach. Fueled in part by broad disappointment with artificial-intelligence research, they argued that human beings don't really process information the way computers do, by manipulating abstract symbols using formal rules. In 1995, a major biological discovery brought even more enthusiasm to the field. Scientists in Italy discovered "mirror neurons" that respond when we see someone else performing an action - or even when we hear an action described - as if we ourselves were performing the action. By simultaneously playing a role in both acting and thinking, mirror neurons suggested that the two might not be so separate after all.
"You were seeing the same system, namely the motor system, playing a role in communication and cognition," says Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology and head of the embodied cognition laboratory at Arizona State University.
This realization has driven much of the recent work looking at how moving and thinking inform and interfere with each other. For example, a pair of studies published in 2006 by Sian Beilock, now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, and Lauren Holt, one of her former students, examined how people who were good at certain physical activities thought about those activities.
In one study, Beilock and Holt had college hockey players, along with a non-hockey-player control group, read a sentence, sometimes hockey-related, sometimes not. Then the subjects would be shown a picture and asked if it corresponded with the sentence. Hockey players and non-hockey players alike almost invariably answered correctly, but on the hockey-related sentences the response times of the hockey players were significantly faster than the nonplayers. In a second study, the researchers found similar results with football players. According to Beilock, the difference in response time wasn't a matter of knowledge - after all, all of the subjects in the study got the vast majority of the questions right. What it suggested, Beilock argues, is that the athletes' greater store of appropriate physical experiences served as a sort of mental shortcut.
"People with different types of motor experiences think in different ways," she argues.
These sorts of results aren't simply limited to thinking about sports, or other highly physical activities. A 2003 study by Michael Spivey, a psychology professor at Cornell, and his student Elizabeth Grant, found that people who were given a tricky spatial relations brainteaser exhibited a distinctive and unconscious pattern of eye movements just before they arrived at the answer. The subjects seemed to unconsciously work through the problem by enacting possible solutions with their gaze.
A study published in August by Alejandro Lleras and Laura Thomas, two psychologists at the University of Illinois, built on those results by inducing the eye movements Spivey had discovered. Lleras and Thomas found that doing so greatly improved the rate at which people solved the problem - even though most never figured out that the eye movements had anything to do with it.
"The subjects actually think that the eye-tracking task is very distracting," Lleras says. "They think we're doing this to keep them from solving the problem."
Other studies have looked at non-spatial problems and at memory. Work led by Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, has found that children given arithmetic problems that normally would be too difficult for them are more likely to get the right answer if they're told to gesture while thinking. And studies by Helga Noice, a psychologist at Elmhurst College, and her husband Tony Noice, an actor and director, found that actors have an easier time remembering lines their characters utter while gesturing, or simply moving.
The body, it appears, can subtly shape people's preferences. A study led by John Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, found that subjects (all non-Chinese speakers) shown a series of Chinese ideographs while either pushing down or pulling up on a table in front of them will say they prefer the ideographs they saw when pulling upward over the ones they saw while pushing downward. Work by Beilock and Holt found that expert typists, when shown pairs of two-letter combinations and told to pick their favorite, tend to pick the pairs that are easier to type - without being able to explain why they did so.
What's particularly interesting to neuroscientists is the role that movement seems to play even in abstract thinking. Glenberg has done multiple studies looking at the effect of arm movements on language comprehension. In Glenberg's work, subjects were asked to determine whether a string of words on a computer screen made sense. To answer they had to reach toward themselves or away from themselves to press a button.
What Glenberg has found is that subjects are quicker to answer correctly if the motion in the sentence matches the motion they must make to respond. If the sentence is, for example, "Andy delivered the pizza to you," the subject is quicker to discern the meaning of the sentence if he has to reach toward himself to respond than if he has to reach away. The results are the same if the sentence doesn't describe physical movement at all, but more metaphorical interactions, such as "Liz told you the story," or "Anne delegates the responsibilities to you."
The implication, Glenberg argues, is that "we are really understanding this language, even when it's more abstract, in terms of bodily action."
Some linguists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers go further - arguing that the roots of even the most complex and esoteric aspects of human thought lie in the body. The linguist George Lakoff, of the University of California, Berkeley, along with Rafael Nunez, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, have for several years advanced the argument that much of mathematics, from set theory to trigonometry to the concept of infinity, derives not from immutable properties of the universe but from the evolutionary history of the human brain and body. Our number system, they argue, and our understanding of addition and subtraction emerge from the fact that we are bipedal animals that measure off distances in discrete steps.
"If we had wheels, or moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes," Lakoff argues, "math might be very different."
These ideas have met intense opposition among mathematicians, but also among some cognitive scientists, who believe they reflect an overreaching reading of a promising but still sketchy set of experimental results.
"I think these findings are really fantastic and it's clear that there's a lot of connection between mind and body," says Arthur Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. He remains skeptical, though, that the roots of higher cognition will be found in something as basic as the way we walk or move our eyes or arms.
"Any time there's a fad in science there's a tendency to say, 'It's all because of this,"' Markman says. "But the thing in psychology is that it's not all anything, otherwise we'd be done figuring it out already."
While embodied cognition remains a young field, some specialists believe that it suggests a rethinking of how we approach education. Angeline Lillard, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, says that one possibility is to take another look at the educational approach that Italian educator Maria Montessori laid out nearly 100 years ago, theories that for decades were ignored by mainstream educators. A key to the Montessori method is the idea that children learn best in a dynamic environment full of motion and the manipulation of physical objects. In Montessori schools, children learn the alphabet by tracing sandpaper letters, they learn math using blocks and cubes, they learn grammar by acting out sentences read to them.
To Lillard, the value of embodied cognition in education is self-evident.
"Our brains evolved to help us function in a dynamic environment, to move through it and find food and escape predators," she says. "It didn't evolve to help us sit in a chair in a classroom and listen to someone and regurgitate information."
Web link: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/13/dont_just_stand_there_think/?page=full
Source:
People think with their bodies, not just with their brains, according to some recent studies.
The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett reports on the emerging field of “embodied cognition,” which suggests that actions such as pacing the carpet or gesturing with one’s hands might clarify the thought process as much as anything going on in the brain. Researchers vary in how much emphasis they give to the body’s role in thinking. But by examining how actions shape thoughts, they all aim to erase the presumed divide between mind and body that dates back at least to philosopher René Descartes in the 17th century.
For instance, a study led by Arizona State University psychology professor Arthur Glenberg found that arm movements can affect language comprehension. Children are more likely to solve mathematics problems if they are told to gesture with their hands as they think through the problem. Another line of research has found that unconscious eye movements help people solve certain kinds of brainteasers.
Body actions also seem to subtly shape preferences over time. Expert typists, when told to name their favorite two-letter combinations from a random selection, picked out easy-to-type couplets, but couldn’t give a reason why they preferred them.
At the extreme, some embodied cognition thinkers say that the form of the human body has shaped some apparently abstract concepts. Linguist George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley, believes that the number system has its roots in humans’ ability to walk upright, which makes it possible to measure distances in discrete steps. If humans “moved along the ground on our bellies like snakes math might be quite different,” says Mr. Lakoff. – Robin Moroney
Web link:
Also: google “embodied cognition”
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Americans Turn Within For Spiritual Growth
People can have a close relationship with God without going to church. That’s one implication of a survey recently completed interviewing fourteen hundred adult Americans, and reported in USA Today. The respondents were chosen on the basis of their not having attended a church service in over six months. The survey found that more than seventy per cent believed in God or a supreme being. More than eighty per cent indicated that they had a close relationship with their god.
Some of the more popular spiritual practices are meditation or quiet time, reading spiritual books, involvement in crafts with a spiritual approach, participating in community volunteerism. One of the most frequently mentioned motivations for this inner search is the increased stress and hectic quality of modern life and the increasing uncertainty of our times.
Source:
More Americans' spiritual growth nurtured within
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald, Special for USA TODAY
Two weeks into the New Year, life in the USA is largely back to normal. That means time is scarce, stress is high and an ordinary day — filled with chatter and other noise — permits barely a moment for the mind to rest in silence.
Maybe that's why a growing number of Americans are recognizing a need to develop their inner life — if not as a spiritual practice, as a way to cultivate balance and depth in an increasingly hectic, chaotic, 24/7 world.
But many don't know where to begin, especially if they don't consider themselves "religious." Even if they are religious, many haven't found everything they're seeking in weekly services.
A survey released last week of 1,400 U.S. adults who haven't attended religious services in six months found that 72% nevertheless believe that "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." The survey, by LifeWay Research, also found that 86% said they can have a "good relationship with God without belonging to a church."
To many people, focusing on their "inner life" means cultivating a closer relationship with God, perhaps by developing a meditation or prayer practice or developing other spiritual disciplines. To others, it may be a more secular quest for tranquility and connectedness.
"An inner life is something everybody has, but we lose touch with it," says Bill Dietrich, executive director of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Bethesda, Md. As Americans, "our lives don't support a contemplative lifestyle" so much as "a constant search for efficiency. We've got to have some way of breaking through to what's really important for us, and spiritual discipline helps us to do that."
Whether religious or secular in nature, Dietrich and others say, an inner life blossoms as its four key components are purposefully cultivated. These involve:
•Taking time for quiet and solitude.
•Cultivating some type of regular spiritual practice or discipline.
•Grounding this spiritual practice in the support of a community.
•Bringing reflection and heightened awareness to everything you do.
Such undertakings can provide a refreshing change of perspective and an antidote to stress and worry.
Patricia Carlson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living, an online community that encourages gratefulness as a spiritual practice, says "people feel very depleted right now and stressed out and overly busy, oftentimes despairing about world situations." This fosters an overall sense of unease, she says, that can be tough to dispel without intentional effort.
Intentional effort can entail a traditional spiritual practice or some other activity that clears the mind by freeing it from the distractions of ordinary thinking. Many people combine several practices.
Back to basics
Steve Clark, pastor of the Evangelical Free Church of Salt Lake City, reads a few Bible passages each morning and prays for understanding before his children wake up.
Dietrich, a Quaker who meditates regularly, also makes hiking a spiritual practice by being "aware of everything around me."
Christians have in recent years fueled a surge of interest in traditional practices, such as "praying the hours," which involves reciting prayers and psalms at specified times of day, similar to monastic prayers.
Others make a spiritual practice of crafts and handiwork such as knitting and quilting, says Lynn Garrett, religion editor of Publishers Weekly, who notes that books about the spirituality of crafts are steady sellers.
"We live in such a noisy culture, such a culture of distraction," Garrett says. "One of the benefits of all these practices — prayer, meditation or even crafting — is to focus attention and create some quiet mental space. People are really hungry for that."
Choosing a spiritual practice shouldn't be an arbitrary process, says Christopher Beeley, an Episcopal priest and assistant professor of early Christian theology at Yale Divinity School.
He suggests people "begin by reflecting on what is most important to them, preferably in conversation with time-honored spiritual teachings, and by developing the practices that best support those values and beliefs."
Community is key
Embarking on the purposeful inner life means daring to be alone in silence at times, but that doesn't mean cutting oneself off altogether from other people. On the contrary, Dietrich says, community is "critical" to keep the process fruitful.
"When left to our own devices, human beings can come up with unlimited delusions," Dietrich says. "We need somewhere we can go to test our own reality."
Community connections to support the inner life can take various forms. A person might share experiences in a faith community, in a support group, in psychotherapy or in spiritual direction, which involves working with a trained guide in matters of the spirit, Beeley says. He says the process of reflecting with partners should help clarify the ultimate values that guide an individual's life.
Relying on communities to guide introspective processes is a principle that resonates with the religious and secular alike.
Christians need time alone in prayer, but they burn out unless they stay in touch with a larger group of believers, says Gary Thomas, founder of the Center for Evangelical Spirituality in Bellingham, Wash.
In contemplation, "you go into your closet, and you get God's heart and you're motivated to work on behalf of God's kingdom," Thomas says. "But if you focus too much on the contemplative life, you become sort of like the marathoner who's always carbo-loading and never racing. You become bloated and slow. … So accountability (to a group) is important."
By contrast, Kerry Odell, a Scripps College economist from Upland, Calif., doesn't belong to a faith community or believe in God, though she says she is open to the prospect. She has been on a search for meaning since she turned 40 nine years ago and began asking deeper questions. She makes it a point to reflect and feel grateful when she walks with her dog, Finn, but she also makes sure to stay close with a community of friends.
To hear a friend's viewpoint "is putting on a pair of glasses," Odell says. "Getting a pat on the back or a cheering section … a companion, a listener, is a wonderful thing."
Though some find benefits in sticking to a regimented schedule, not everyone finds it easy — or even possible — to do so.
"I set up a little corner of my house with a candle and a comfortable chair and these great plans to spend a half an hour there every day, but I don't do it," Odell says. "I keep hoping I will."
Nevertheless, Odell has found ways to expand her inner life. She has attended about eight three-day retreats held at monasteries over the past three years.
Silence doesn't come easily to everyone: A completely silent retreat, she says, can seem "like a prolonged time inside an elevator." But on the whole, she relishes the chance to escape from the steady noise that marks her daily life.
Seeking out silence
Those who host retreats say there's a need for what they have to offer. Sometimes, more than any words of wisdom or guidance, people crave silence and may need to get away in order to experience it, says Sister Jeanne Ranek, director of the Benedictine Peace Center, which hosts retreats at the Sacred Heart Monastery in Yankton, S.D.
Those who attend retreats "look to surround themselves for a while with some external peace to get in touch with the inner peace so they can go back refreshed and renewed," she says.
Living the inner life amid the daily demands of work, school and home poses substantial challenges, but it is in ordinary routines that a contemplative habit gets reinforced.
To teach the art of heightened awareness, Rabbi Mike Comins of Los Angeles leads groups on tours where he provides instruction in "meditative walking" in wilderness areas. Participants learn to listen using "the right side of their brain," which is associated with intuition and creativity rather than language. The result, he says, is a greater sensitivity to one's surroundings — and an emerging skill set that helps people attend to what's most important when they return to civilization.
"People should wonder: 'On the day before my death, am I going to look back and say I made good decisions?' " says Comins, author of A Wild Faith: Jewish Ways Into Wilderness, Wilderness Ways into Judaism. "A spiritual practice should get you to do that long before that day. Wilderness helps because you see (the fragility of life) all around you. … Wilderness just naturally makes you mindful because, far from hospitals, you pay big time if you're not mindful" in that environment.
Americans are using daily activities to strengthen habits of mindfulness, says Columbia University sociologist of religion Courtney Bender, who sees busy people increasingly making routines such as jogging or cooking into meditative activities.
Those who cook with raised awareness, she says, seem to experience connections with nature and neighbor that they might otherwise miss.
"You're talking about people who are already hard-pressed for time," Bender says. "They don't have to take on a new project. They can just think differently about the things they're already doing."
Weblink: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-01-13-spiritual-growth_N.htm
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Academic Philosopher is a Creative Psi Researcher
“What if your brain were pulled out of your skull, put into a vat, and hooked up to a computer that could keep it alive and simulate external stimuli? Would you know that you were no longer inside your body? Therefore, can you know anything about the external world?”
This “thought experiment” is but one of the entertaining and educational puzzles grappled by Stephan E. Braude in his book, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (University of Chicago Press). A professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association. Even though a philosopher by training, he has conducted some very original and unique experiments in the realm of Psi, such as the psychic effects of one person’s emotions on the physiological state of another person who was unaware of the experiment.
Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education published an extensive article on his career and research. He waited until he got tenure to conduct and publish his Psi research, and then was surprised to find that his colleagues shunned him. His book is his “kiss and tell book.” He debunks many psychics as well as many skeptics, such as Paul Kurtz, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. The Amazing Randi is also one of his targets. The title of his book comes from a true life case involving an illiterate woman in Florida who would go into trance and write in French. She helped solved police mysteries and once predicted that bales of marijuana would float up onto a specific shore on a given day and time—she was correct!
Braude also admits to using Psi for personal gain. He and his astrologer wife gamble and during the 2005 football season won enough to pay for their summer vacation. The Chronicle quotes him as saying, "I stopped worrying about trying to convince other people," he says. "I'm in this to try to figure out things for myself."
Source:
After a formative encounter with the paranormal, one philosopher embraced the study of it
By SCOTT CARLSON
The pivotal moment of Stephen E. Braude's academic career happened when he was in graduate school, on a dull afternoon in Northampton, Mass., in 1969.
Or, at least, what follows is what he says happened. Readers — skeptics and believers both — will have to make up their own minds.
Braude and two friends had seen the only movie in town and were looking for something to do. His friends suggested going to Braude's house and playing a game called "table up." In other words, they wanted to perform a séance.
They sat at a folding table, with their fingers lightly touching the tabletop, silently urging it to levitate. Suddenly it shuddered and rose several inches off the ground, then came back down. Then it rose a second time. And again and again. Braude and his friends worked out a code with the table, and it answered questions and spelled out names.
Braude says he had not given much thought to the paranormal before that afternoon, but the experience shook him to his core, he says, sitting in an easy chair in his immaculate home in suburban Baltimore. He insists there was no way his friends could have manipulated the table, adding, "I should tell you, we were not stoned."
Today Braude, 62, is one of the few mainstream academics applying his intellectual training to questions that many would regard at best as impossible to answer, and at worst absolutely ridiculous: Do psychic phenomena exist? Are mediums and ghosts real? Can people move objects with their minds or predict the future? A professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, Braude is a past president of the Parapsychological Association, an organization that gathers academics and others interested in phenomena like ESP and psychokinesis, and he has published a series of books with well-known academic presses on such topics.
His latest, The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations (University of Chicago Press), is sort of a summing up of his career, filled with stories of people who claimed to have otherworldly abilities. The writing is so fluid that the book at times seems made for a screen adaptation. (In fact, Chris Carter, creator of The X-Files, contributes a blurb to the back of the book. Braude advised Carter on a screenplay he is writing.) But Braude also includes some dense philosophical arguments — especially in a chapter about synchronicity, in which he ponders whether humans can orchestrate unlikely coincidences through psychokinesis, the ability to move or influence objects with the mind.
"He is setting the standard for how an analytic philosopher who takes this stuff seriously should proceed," says Raymond Martin, chairman of the philosophy department at Union College, in New York, who formerly worked at the University of Maryland at College Park and met Braude then. "He's very thorough in informing himself about what has been shown empirically, and he is cautious. He is usually skeptical in the end, but he is not dismissive."
Martin thinks philosophers are often too quick to dismiss anything that smacks of exotic phenomena because they want to protect the integrity of the discipline. "A lot of people just don't want this stuff on the table, because they regard it as an embarrassment to philosophy," he says. "Steve does take it seriously, and he has paid a price."
Greg Ealick took several of Braude's classes 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate at UMBC, and he is now Braude's colleague as an adjunct instructor in the philosophy department there. He says the philosophical aspects of Braude's work are "first-rate," although he's not convinced of the science of researching paranormal phenomena.
Braude's explorations could be seen as thought experiments, he says. Common in philosophy, such experiments pose odd scenarios to test arguments. A particularly well-known one asks: What if your brain were pulled out of your skull, put into a vat, and hooked up to a computer that could keep it alive and simulate external stimuli? Would you know that you were no longer inside your body? Therefore, can you know anything about the external world? "A lot of first-rate philosophy of mind comes from wildly speculative thought experiments," Ealick says. "I don't think that Steve's are really any wilder than the rest."
After his experience with the table in Northampton, Braude says, he put the event out of his mind for almost a decade. He got a job at the University of Maryland in 1971, and he went about publishing articles on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language for the next seven years, until he got tenure.
Then he came out, so to speak. He knew that philosophers, like William James and later H.H. Price, had studied paranormal phenomena such as spiritualism and life after death. He thought he could demonstrate to colleagues that such phenomena were still worth studying. "To show you how naïve I was, I actually thought that they would be pleased to discover that they were wrong, so long as that brought them closer to discovering the truth." Instead, many shunned him.
"It clarified for me a lot about the scholarly community generally, something that has been confirmed over and over and over," he says. "It's not the haven of intellectual freedom that it is often cracked up to be."
Some of that jaded perspective comes through in The Gold Leaf Lady, which Braude describes as his "kiss-and-tell book" about his paranormal research. He trashes plenty of people in the book, including supposed psychics and their handlers who appear to be frauds. But he saves his sharpest barbs for prominent skeptics, like Paul Kurtz, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and James Randi, a magician better known as the Amazing Randi. Randi is described as a "publicity hound" who "weaseled out" of a challenge to explain phenomena produced by Ted Serios, who some believe could make odd and spooky images appear on Polaroid film. Kurtz is described as "disreputable" and sloppy. The skeptics, Braude says, pick out the weakest cases and demolish them, then use those spectacular debunkings to persuade the public that all exotic claims are bosh.
Braude believes that most people who dismiss the possibility of paranormal phenomena simply have not considered "the best cases" in parapsychology — cases like that of D.D. Home, which Braude summarizes in The Gold Leaf Lady. Home, a medium who lived in the mid-1800s, allegedly performed several fantastic phenomena under strict observation. He once held an accordion by one hand inside an electrified cage, and the instrument played all by itself — or so several observers documented.
Another "best case," according to Mr. Braude, is the real-life gold-leaf lady of the book's title. She is an allegedly illiterate Florida woman named Katie who goes into trances and writes in French, has predicted events for police detectives with stunning accuracy (like the time she predicted that bales of marijuana would wash up on a particular beach on a particular day, and they did), and occasionally finds flakes of paper-thin brass growing on her body. Braude believes that he saw a piece of brass appear spontaneously on her face during an interview. (He has kept some samples of the brass leaf in Ziploc bags.)
But other chapters of The Gold Leaf Lady describe the difficulties of putting strict controls on tests of "psi" abilities (like psychokinesis or ESP) and the inconclusive results that follow. Braude tells the story of Dennis, a fellow who showed potential in psychokinesis and was in many ways an ideal test subject. He was easy to work with, and he had no problem stripping and changing into inspected garments in front of a camera (a standard test procedure to make sure a subject isn't hiding any trick devices). But each time Dennis traveled from California, he traveled on a red-eye flight and arrived tired and flustered, like an athlete who hadn't rested before a big game. That, Braude believes, may explain in part why Dennis could not do much during the controlled tests.
Or it could have been the disdain a colleague showed for Dennis, which may have undermined his confidence before the tests. While observers want to apply strict controls, they don't want to squelch phenomena by applying pressure or making test subjects feel badgered. "That would be like saying, Let me see an erection," Braude says.
Or it could have been a "source of psi" problem — that is, the unconscious, latent psi abilities of the testers could have interrupted the movement of the objects.
(Sadly, Dennis could not continue his tests under better conditions. After he traveled back to California the second time, he was bitten by an opossum and died of a heart infection.)
Even to consider the question of psychic ability, never mind going through the trouble of testing people like Dennis, takes a leap in faith that psychic ability actually exists — a leap that many people aren't willing to make.
And some people at UMBC seem to not want to be associated with his research, or even talk about it. Senior members of Braude's own department either did not reply or did not want to comment about his work when contacted by The Chronicle.
In 2002 Braude gave a lecture to the physics department, where he says he was shouted down by other professors. Lynn Sparling, an associate professor of physics at the university, doesn't remember the substance of the talk, but she remembers her impression of Braude. "I came away feeling that this guy was kind of an embarrassment to the university," she says. "I just thought he was a total goofball. I couldn't believe some of the things that I was hearing."
"If you're going to talk about that stuff, you really need to know what the physical laws are," she says. "If something is defying gravity, you have to have a reason for defying a law that has been proven over and over and over again."
In an e-mail message, Braude responds that so little is understood about psychokinesis (if indeed psychokinesis is real) that a levitating table does not necessarily defy laws of physics. And, he says, we don't necessarily have to understand and explain a phenomenon to know that it is real. "This matter could only be a problem for those who naïvely believe that physics must have an explanation for everything that happens," he says.
Larry Wilt, library director at UMBC, who has a doctorate in philosophy, has read much of Braude's work and admires its philosophical rigor. "My sense is that he is well respected by people on campus who have read his work," he says. "Those who haven't read it will dismiss it out of hand."
Braude will retire within a few years, and he's not sure to what extent he will continue to study the paranormal after he leaves the university. He is a pianist trained in classical music and jazz — a beautiful grand piano sits in his living room — and he plans to devote lots of time to playing and performing with groups.
He is also a stereoscopic photographer, with a collection of antique equipment, some inherited from his grandfather. His photos of landscapes pop to life in three dimensions when placed in a viewer. His portraits of people are so lifelike they are eerie — human beings locked in time, almost like wax figures.
But there may also be new horizons for him in parapsychology. Djurdjina Ruk, his wife of five years, studies astrology. Once a professor of psychology at the University of Novi Sad, in the former Yugoslavia, she supported herself during the recent civil war by providing astrological predictions for European and Chinese soccer teams and for the Serbian mafia. She wanted for nothing and was even offered a Ferrari by the mob while the country around her imploded, as Braude details in the last chapter of The Gold Leaf Lady.
Braude says that during their time together she has been uncannily accurate, determining, for example, the time of the birth of one of Braude's friends down to the minute. The couple plan their trips and vacations around her astrological charts. They also gamble based on her predictions; their winnings during the 2005 football season paid for a summer vacation.
He's still not sure what to make of it. He once regarded astrology with the sort of disdain that others bring to his work, but now he thinks he should have an open mind. One thing is certain: He doesn't care what other people think.
"I stopped worrying about trying to convince other people," he says. "I'm in this to try to figure out things for myself."
Scott Carlson is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.
Weblink: http://www.mind-energy.net/archives/270-The-Truth-Is-Out-There-Story-of-Stephen-Braude.html
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