#

Cap.

Auctor-trix

PP.

0A

Foreword

Helga Breuninger

vii-x

0B

Introduction

Jeffrey J. Kripal

xi-xli

1

Re-sacralization of the Modern World

Roderick Main

1 to 27

2

Resistance and Telepathy

Mikita Brottman

28-48

3

Realist Idealism

Edward F. Kelly

49-86

4

PsiSpy

Edwin C. May

87-125

5

New Scientific Paradigm

Diane Hennacy Powell

126-51

6

Anomalous Moments

James W. Lomax

152-73

7

Parapsychology and Yoga

Koneru Ramakrishna Rao

174-207

8

Not Seeing Aeternity

Dean Radin

208-38

9

Paranormality of Everyday Life

Jeremy Biles

239-70

p.

author/-ess

gend.

university

book authored

307

Jeremy Biles

M

DePaul

Ecce Monstrum

Mikita Brottman

F

Maryland Inst

--

308

Edward F. Kelly

M

of Virginia

Irreducible Mind

Jeffrey J. Kripal

M

Rice

Authors of the Impossible

James W. Lomax

M

Baylor College

--

309

Roderick Main

M

of Essex

Rupture of Time

Edwin C. May

M

Stanford

--

Diane Hennacy Powell

F

--

ESP Enigma

310

Dean Radin

M

Sonoma State

Conscious Universe

Koneru Ramakrishna Rao

M

--

Consciousness and Yoga

0A

Foreword

Helga Breuninger

vii-x

"After Dreams and Dreaming,

Seriously Strange is the second volume of a series on 'Boundaries of Consciousness' ... . ...

It will be followed by further volumes on death and dying in 2012 and on creativity and imagination in 2013."

"In 2008, we began, with Sudhir Kakar and Almuth Sellschopp, a series of meetings bringing individuals with high academic reputations in the fields of theology, philosophy, medicine, history and psychotherapy."

p. vii

"The present volume is the fruit of a symposium held at Wasan Island on Lake Muskoka in Ontario ... in ... 2010." "Wasan Island is ... A heart-shaped island ... in the middle of Lake Muskoka in Canada".

p. ix

"Thanks to its ... indigenous American Indian past, Wasan Island is particularly suitable as a location for ... the symposium".

0B

Introduction

Jeffrey J. Kripal

xi-xli

"Sometimes, the strange is seriously strange. That is to say, sometimes the anomalous, the extraordinary perception, is philosophically ... and scientifically significant. ... The strange is serious, and often the most serious is the most strange."

p. xiv

"psychical phenomena continue to happen all the time to all sorts of people, including, of course, to scientists."

p. 271, n. 0B:1

"Consider ... Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 ... . In his autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, 1998, Pantheon Books, New York, Mullis dedicates an entire chapter to ... an alien abduction experience involving a talking, glowing racoon. ...

... Mullis insists that ... he has barely a clue what it means."

{The apparition was evidently of an AmerIndian racoon-deity, who was therewith suggesting to read up on any AmerIndian tribal myths about rathcoons, so that the deity would therethrough have enough of a psychical connection to be able to furnish definite advice, praesumably about chemistry.}

p. xv

"Frederic Myers ... turned to psychical research after meeting the famous medium Stainton Moses in 1874. At the encouragement of ... Henry Sidgwick, a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge, Myers helped to found the London Society for Psychical Research with Edmund Gurney ... in 1882. In 1885, the Harvard philosopher ... William James founded an American branch.

... James was an inveterate and enthusiastic psychical researcher ..., and published numerous essays on his findings.

[p. 271, n. 0B:3 : "see The Works of William James : Essays in Psychical Research, 1986, Harvard University Press, Cambridge[, Massachusetts]".]

Myers and James, moreover, were close friends. ...

p. xvi

Myers died in Rome in 1901".

p. xvi

"Samuel Clemens, better known under his pen name Mark Twain ... even published a few essays on his own psychical experiences. ...

[p. 271, n. 0B:5 : "Mark Twain, Tales of Wonder, edited ... by David Ketterer, 2003, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln".]

p. xvii

His life was riddled with ... strange coincidences, even seeming psychokinetic powers and precognitive dreams."

"Clemens ... read the pamphlets and journals of the London Society for Psychical Research; and ... published ... in Harper's magazine ... two essays entitled 'Mental Telegraphy' ... and 'Mental Telegraphy, Again'".

p. xviii

"Clemens draws a ... conclusion ... that 'original ideas' ... might be plucked right out of the air by a sensitive mind, and ...

who originally sent them? Hence all

{This is a conclusionary deduction consisting of a quaery.}

p. xix

those well-known double- or even triple-discoveries in the history of science, where the same idea is 'discovered', like the Wallace-and-Darwin 'coincidence', Clemens points out (a reference to Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin, the two co-discoverers of what would become evolutionary biology).

Here the discovery of evolution [of the biological species] becomes itself a kind of occult event."

{This is quite an astute realization on the part of Samuel Clemens, especially if he was not aware that Alfred Wallace was himself a self-declared occultist.}

"Clemens had especially noticed the phenomenon of 'crossed letters', which involved

a person['s] writing [and mailing an epistle to] a long-lost friend or family member[,] only to find a letter from that person arrive in the mail :

{A variant (provided by Myers) of this scenario is stated on p. xviii supra : a person's writing (whether mailing it or not) an epistle to a colleague suggesting a business-venture, only to find prompty the arrival in the mail of an epistle from the same colleague suggesting the same venture.}

somehow, the letters would 'cross' in the mail.

Clemens came to believe that minds somehow send out signals, like a telegraph, and, most weirdly, that it is the intention that manifests {or as more cogently stated, "enableth manifestation of"} the effect."

{This effect of intention, where the intention is materially manifested in physically sent messages, is similar to the effect of intention in spoken prayers, where the intention is manifested in the physical act of speaking.}

"this is where it gets really, really weird -- the lore of the paranormal is positively filled with accounts of

voices speaking through literal radios, televisions and phones."

{variations of the "direct voice" spirit-mediumship}

p. xx

"Myers's supernormal can only be understood in relation to ... his ... 'imaginal'. ...

p. xxi

But in certain very special contexts,

{Said contexts occur when one is being assisted therein by a spirit-guide or by a spirit-helper.}

the ... imagination can take on genuinely transcendent capacities, that is, it can make contact with ... a real spiritual world ... . In these cases, Myers thought,

the imaginary blends into the imaginal

{/blends into/ signifying 'becometh subordinated to, and controlled by'}

and the human imagination becomes a kind of 'super sense', a mystical organ of psychical perception. ...

In his more technical terms, such imaginal capacities were 'preversions' that represented

[quoted from Myers 1903, vol. 1, p. xx :] 'a tendency to

characteristics

{personal spiritual qualities}

assumed

{temporarily occupied, as a praeview}

to lie

{to exist potentiatably}

at a further point of evolutionary progress

{by means of ethical and spiritual self-cultivation}

of a species

{i.e., the society of mystics/occultists}

than has yet been reached'."

{as a stable and permanent attainment}

p. xxii

"Myers and his colleagues developed an entire psychology of non-ordinary phenomena that rejected both the reductive materialisms of nineteenth century rationalism {so-called; there is actually nothing rational about materialism} and the ... nai:ve beliefs of the faith traditions.

... they called this new approach the tertium quid, the Third Thing or Third Way. ...

{Similarly, "Illuminationist philosophy ... sought to discover the third way in philosophy between Peripatetic ... thought and mysticism" (EAPh, s.v. "Al-Suhrawardi", p. 520b).}

p. xxiii

In more popular terms, the tertium quid of Myers and his colleagues was an early form of 'being spiritual but not religious'."

p. 272, n. 0B:14

"between the 'religious' and the 'spiritual' ... the distinction is probably first found in Emerson's early essays, after which it blooms in Whitman's ecstatic poem-prophecy Leaves of Grass (1855) and eventually finds a very explicit expression in Democratic Vistas (1871). ... See Leigh Eric Schmidt ... 2005 ...; and Michael Robertson ... 2008".

p. xxiv

"[Wolfgang] Pauli was in fact infamous among his physics colleagues for a most unusual (and expensive) ability. ... an 'aparatus

p. xxv

would fall, break , shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory' [Radin 1997, p. 131].

Pauli was a walking poltergeist."

{More accurately, he was protected by a gremlin (which was his praeternatural bodyguard).}

"In turns out that [Sigmund] Freud {famous for speculating oddly on erotic aspects of psychology} ... wrote numerous essays on telepathy or 'thought-transference' and privately confessed being fascinated by ghost stories and superstitions of various sorts. His friend and colleague Ernest Jones ... has amply documented [1957, vol. 3, cap. 14 "Occultism"] all of this".

"In 1947... formed a Medical Section of the American Society for Psychical Research. Members included Jan Ehrenwald, Jule Eisenbud, Joost Meerloo, Montague Ullman and G. Pederson-Krag. [Murphy 1992, pp. 376-83]

Eisenbud ... argued that paranormal effects ... go unnoticed in everyday life, where they are in actual fact omnipresent. ... psychically conditioned events, Eisenbud wrote [1970, p. 287], '... are to be looked for ... everywhere, throughout the warp and woof of our existence.'"

Ian Stevenson's "Reincarnation and Biology, a massive 2,300-page, two-volume study ... calls 'the biology of reincarnation', ... the phenomenon of birthmarks or birth-defects as physical 'marks' corresponding to a previous life's".

p. xxvii

Sursem is "a small collective of psychologists, philosophers, historians and physicists meeting at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California." [p. 273, n. 0B:21 "For more on the history of Sursem, see my 'Mind Matters ... .''' (i.e., Kripal 2012)]

The first eight years of meetings were summarized in a large volume edited by Kelly himself entitled Irreducible Mind."

p. xxviii

"human consciousness ... does exist, again much like the TV{-informing radio-wave} signal that surrounds us at all times but needs a special receptor {a body, or whatever} to be picked up".

{More actually, radio-signals can be likened better [as asserted by Stanislav Groff (supra p. xx)] to specifically telepathic (or consciousness-transference) signals; whereas consciousness may rather be likened to the space-cum-matter composite (empty space to consciousness without specific content, matter to specific content of consciousness).}

p. xxix

"a most commonly observed, and oft suppressed, pattern in the literature : the manner in which human sexuality and the paranormal appear to be

{Where sexual behaviour is treated (as in the Kaula/tantrik system) as a means of ritually communicating with the deities, this was already prohibited by orthodox Christianity (though allowed in varieties of Gnosticism and of Qabbalah) -- it was aequated by the orthodox Christians with witchcraft.}

p. xxx

linked, and the subsequent fashion in which the taboo against speaking {actually, mostly against publishing} about sexuality has been replaced in the modern world by the taboo against speaking about the paranormal."

In materialist scientism, "what we have is ... very familiar to the historian of religions : a carefully guarded and patrolled public orthodoxy, in this case a scientific one,

{Just as in antiquity, religious orthodoxies were intended and designed to protect the private property of ruling classes; so likewise, modern dogmata of materialist scientism are likewise intended to safeguard the property-rights of ploutokrat families.}

shadowed by heretical 'hidden things' (ta mystika), some of which is quite literally classified as 'secret' {and especially as "top secret"} by the US government."

{Such "hidden things" are, e.g., the flying saucers, general public knowledge whereof could easily encourage socialist-communist socio-oikonomic praedominancy.}

p. xxxiv

"once two particles interact with each other, they become 'entangled' and ... 'know' what happens to each other, instantly, no matter how great the ... distance. ...

{Einstein invented his own version of "spooky action at a distance", which he applied only, however, to directionalization of gravitation. This was in his modification of Isaac Newton explanation of the "aberration of light" : where Newton spoke of gravitation in general as supraluminal (because if a planet were to depend on a light-speed signal from the sun to determine its direction for being attracted toward the sun, it would be some 5 minutes in late in time, and therefore wrongly directionalized by about 1 degree, so that it would be promptly thrown out of orbit), Einstein modified this to supraluminal transmission of the information (concerning the direction) and not of the force of the attraction. The analogy in electromagnetism would be distinction between the velocity of a wave-packet (which is a quantum-effect, and supraluminal like quantum-tunneling) and the velocity of a wave-front (which is neither).}

p. xxxv

Einstein ... called this ... property of matter spukhafte Fernwirkungen or 'spooky action at a distance' ... . ... first articulated {?! first experimentally proven : it had been deduced/conjectured ("articulated") decades earlier} in 1964 {years after Einstein had died} by physicist John Bell, entanglement has been empirically established in the laboratory numerous times since."

"If such entanglement reaches up to human consciousness, that is, if quantum effects are not blurred out as one scales up ..., such modeling could explain the non-local phenomenon of telepathy, which appear to involve precisely this sort of entanglement between two individuals who have once interacted, usually quite intimately, but are now separated ... (hence the robustness of {identical-}twin telepathy)."

{Not quite! Quantum-effects persist in large agglomerations of atoms in a "Bose–Einstein condensate", which is achieved by cryogenics. Retention of the quantum-effects is dependent on supercooling (instead of entirely on "scale"); so that if consciousness be dependent on quantum effects, its physical basis must be kept at a temperature approximating absolute zero. This is not feasible in the material plane, but if the temperatures within the subtler planes-of-existence hover nigh absolute zero, then (because consciousness is a function of subtle bodies, rather than of material bodies -- though the subtle bodies may be encased in a material body) various aspects of consciousness may be a result of quantum-effects. [written Feb 10 2015]}

p. xxxvi

"And my 'thinking anew' about psychical experiences? I tend to think about such things {affairs} ... in erotic and literary terms. ...

p. xxxvii

Historians Adam Crabtree [1993, p. 196] and Bertrand Me'heust [1999, vol. 1, p. 112] ... have also written about the obvious erotic charge ... of some of these magnetic ["animal magnetism" = hypnosis] states.

Me'heust, for example, discusses a somnambulist named Willy Schneider whose

telekinetic performances were accompanied by rapid contractions of his entire body, [phallic] erections and, in seven particular se[']ances, literal ejaculations of sperm : ... Me'heust notes [1999, vol. 2, pp. 191-2] ..., '... a simultaneity between the orgasm and the mediumistic activity.'

{Quite evidently the deity who was (or deities who were) performing the telekinetic effects for him, simultaneously were engaging in sexual intercourse in their own plane-of-existence; while partially occupying his body. [written Feb 17 2015]}

Similarly, the great Italian medium Eusapia Palladino was infamous for her vulgar sexual language and aggressive flirtings, not to mention the fact that

she, like other female physical mediums of her time, would sometimes emit ectoplasm from her vagina."

{Were each of these "female physical mediums" experiencing orgasm during the few seconds while they were emitting ectoplasm? If so, then the ectoplasm may be an aitheric aequivalent to the genital fluid emitted from a woman's Bartholin gland. [written Feb 17 2015]}

p. xxxviii

"Jung, after all, ... would also recognize ... that ... 'the medium had fallen in love with him and her inadmissible passion for her cousin -- which may have been reciprocal -- had contributed significantly to her experiences, many of which involved ... romances of past members of their shared ancestry'." (Main 2004, p. 69)

"[Frederic] Myers first knew personally psychical forces shortly after he fell in love with his ... cousin's wife ..., that helped catalyse ... the post-mortem surival of the human personality. ... Or that he could insist ... that this '... planetary or cosmical scope of the passion of Love is in fact central to the whole subject' [Myers, vol. 1, p. 112]. By his own stark confession, ... an erotic mysticism, laid {lay} at the very heart and centre of Myers' lifework. ... . ... the erotic is the suppressed secret of the mystical even and especially here."

p. xxxix

"sexual themes are more than apparent in Ian Stevenson's work on cases of the reincarnation type, and almost comically so."

p. xxxix

"Radin ... notes [2006, p. 177] that in ... experiments using ... erotic images to test the phenomenon of presentiment, ... the erotic pictures produced presentiment effects at a rate with odds against chance of 320 to 1.

{This may have been accomplished by their having been provided such knowledge of the future by deities' (who praepare/arrange the future) expressing in that way their approval of display of erotic imagery. [written Feb 18 2015]}

He also notes [1997, p. 143] how experiments with cooperating pairs ...

p. xl

produced similar results. Same-sex pairs 'tended to achieve ... slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a "bonded" couple such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals.

In the winter of 2011, this erotic-psychical effect was even flagged on the front page of the New York Times, when the paper reported on the successful effects of Daryl Bem, ... results that clearly suggested a precognitive effect in his subjects, mostly ... when they were sensing future imagesthat were graphically sexual in nature."

results that clearly suggested a precognitive effect in his subjects, mostly ... when they were sensing future images that were graphically sexual in nature."

{Deities of the type who praepare and arrange the nigh future, are likely to also be interested in praeparations for producing bodies for future generations by means of sexual reproduction; such deities would natually be inclined to express their appretiation for sexual interests among mortals, expressing such by assisting them to accomplish tasks requiring praesentiments. [written Feb 18 2015]}