Psychic Phenomena and Mystical Experience

Psychic Phenomena and Mystical Experience
Author: Lawrence L. Leshan
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Total Pages: 15
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1944529306

Mysticism and the paranormal have long been associated in two ways: in the repeated reports of mystically trained individuals acquiring paranormal abilities and in the warnings given in all serious mystical training schools that students who become interested in these abilities will cease to make progress. This essay, chapter 24 of Psychic Exploration, discusses those associations. The full volume of Psychic Exploration can be purchased as an ebook or paperback version from all major online retailers and at cosimobooks.com.

The Afterlife Experiments

The Afterlife Experiments
Author: Gary E. Schwartz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2002-03-13
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 074344258X

An esteemed scientist's personal journey from skepticism to wonder and awe provides astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death? Are love and life eternal? This exciting account presents provocative evidence that could upset everything that science has ever taught. Daring to risk his worldwide academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz, along with his research partner Dr. Linda Russek, asked some of the most prominent mediums in America -- including John Edward, Suzane Northrup, and George Anderson -- to become part of a series of extraordinary experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS This riveting narrative, with its electrifying transcripts, puts the reader on the scene of a breakthrough scientific achievement: contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions. In stringently monitored experiments, leading mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. The messages that came through stunned sitters and researchers alike. Here, as they unfolded in the laboratory setting, are uncanny revelations about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Dr. Schwartz was forced by the overwhelmingly positive data to abandon his skepticism, reaching some startling conclusions. Compelling from the first page to the last, The Afterlife Experiments is the amazing documentation of groundbreaking experiments you will never forget.

The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism

The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism
Author: Herbert Thurston
Publisher:
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2013-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781908733573

The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism by Herbert Thurston is the result of the author's tireless study of a wide range of psychic phenomena, including, levitation, stigmata, telekinesis, luminous phenomena, inedia (living without food), and more.

Sacred Knowledge

Sacred Knowledge
Author: William A. Richards
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2015-12-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231540914

Sacred Knowledge is the first well-documented, sophisticated account of the effect of psychedelics on biological processes, human consciousness, and revelatory religious experiences. Based on nearly three decades of legal research with volunteers, William A. Richards argues that, if used responsibly and legally, psychedelics have the potential to assuage suffering and constructively affect the quality of human life. Richards's analysis contributes to social and political debates over the responsible integration of psychedelic substances into modern society. His book serves as an invaluable resource for readers who, whether spontaneously or with the facilitation of psychedelics, have encountered meaningful, inspiring, or even disturbing states of consciousness and seek clarity about their experiences. Testing the limits of language and conceptual frameworks, Richards makes the most of experiential phenomena that stretch our understanding of reality, advancing new frontiers in the study of belief, spiritual awakening, psychiatric treatment, and social well-being. His findings enrich humanities and scientific scholarship, expanding work in philosophy, anthropology, theology, and religious studies and bringing depth to research in mental health, psychotherapy, and psychopharmacology.

Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience

Harper's Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience
Author: Rosemary Guiley
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
Total Pages: 696
Release: 1991
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN:

An alphabetical guide to the paranormal, with more than five hundred entries on notable individuals, supernatural phenomena such as apparitions and levitation, geographical locations linked to the occult, and spiritual traditions such as Sufism and Taoism.

Irreducible Mind

Irreducible Mind
Author: Edward F. Kelly
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 836
Release: 2010
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781442202061

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

Parapsychology and Religion

Parapsychology and Religion
Author: Everton de Oliveira Maraldi
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2021-06-29
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9004467831

Everton Maraldi explores how research on alleged anomalous processes informs the study of religious/spiritual experiences and examines the theoretical and methodological possibilities and challenges of an interdisciplinary dialogue between parapsychology and psychology of religion.

Proof of Spiritual Phenomena

Proof of Spiritual Phenomena
Author: Mona Sobhani
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2022-08-23
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 164411500X

• Shares data and meta-analysis from a large volume of extremely sophisticated experiments that provide proof for the existence of psi phenomena • Explores evidence of past lives, intuitive knowing, and other spiritual phenomena • Reveals the author’s own inexplicable experiences as well as her conversations with scientific colleagues, high-level experts, and government officials Fully indoctrinated into the cult of science, neuroscientist Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., aggressively defended the dogma of scientific beliefs--until a series of life-altering events caused her to reconsider spirituality and psi concepts and launched her into a two-year investigation into the ineffable mysteries of our world. Sharing the extensive research she discovered on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter, the author details her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker. She reveals her conversations about spirituality and anomalous occurrences with scientific colleagues as well as high-level experts and government officials who shared data on extremely sophisticated experiments that provided proof for the existence of psi phenomena. She discovered that psi research has been conducted on a grand scale for more than a century--by hundreds of scientists with hundreds of thousands of participants--and that there exists substantial evidence for the reality of psi. She examines meta-analysis of these experiments, such as that of the Ganzfield tests, which showed odds against chance of 12 billion to 1--throwing our current scientific materialist paradigm into question. Providing a deep dive into the literature of psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and esoteric texts, Sobhani also explores the relationship between psi phenomena, the transcendence of space and time, and spirituality. Culminating with the author’s serious reckoning with one of the foundational principles of neuroscience--scientific materialism--this illuminating book shows that the mysteries of human experience go far beyond what the present scientific paradigm can comprehend.

The Interpretation of Cosmic and Mystical Experiences

The Interpretation of Cosmic and Mystical Experiences
Author: Robert Crookall
Publisher: James Clarke & Co.
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1969
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780227677292

Albert Schweitzer said 'All the problems of religion ultimately go back to the one - the experience I have of God within myself differs from knowledge concerning Him which I derive from the world ... In the world He is impersonal force; within me, He reveals Himself as Personality'. In his earlier books, Dr Crookall dealt with the most important of psychical experiences, namely, out-of-the-body experiences, popularly called astral projections. These are, he says, natural and normal to mankind. This work is concerned with cosmic and mystical experiences, the 'highest' and most significant of which we are capable. These are also natural and normal to mankind. In the First Part, a large number of experiences of at-one-ment are assembled and classified, preparatory to a consideration of their incidence and nature. Some people have at-one with inanimate objects, others with animate objects (nature), still others with people, and many with God. These various groups are shown to overlap - there is, says Crookall, a complete and unbroken spectrum beginning with minerals and ending with God. It is clear that at-one-ment with God is not, as some writers have supposed, essentially distinct from at-one-ment with nature. On the basis of this, the author agrees with Dr Raynor Johnson and the Revd Sidney Spencer: the latter concluded 'Cosmic consciousness is the natural complement of the experience of union with God'. The Second Part of the book deals with descriptions of at-one-ment that have hitherto been entirely neglected by writers on this important subject, namely, those of 'communicators', the supposed dead. Some supposed dead 'communicators' are shown to describe at-one-ment with inanimate objects, others with nature, with people, and still others with God. Again, these groups overlap to form an unbroken spectrum of experience, as in the experiences of the living - a strong suggestion of surviving souls. In point of fact, Crookall notes that mystical experiences seem to be more frequent among the dead than the living! This, of course, might have been expected. Human mystical experiences are here considered, for the first time, in relation to the correlation suggested in the author's first book.