News

75 posts
  • Shared Death Research Project By Paul Kieniewicz What follows is a letter from Raymond Moody describing an opportunity to contribute to a research project on shared death experiences. Please consider contributing.  What is a Shared Death Experience(SDE)?  Raymond Moody writes:In these experiences, bystanders who are close to a dying person experience many of the same aspects of the NDE along with the ...
  • Witchcraft in the Water Works By Paul Kieniewicz A series of recent articles in the Guardian, expressed a measure of outrage that many water companies in the UK today still employ dowsers to locate underground pipes or leaks. The writers described dowsing as pseudoscience, a “medieval practice”, essentially witchcraft. The articles inspired an outpouring of protest in letters to the Guardian’s ...
  • Plant Fields and the Bumble Bee The fact that living beings are surrounded by an electric field should not come as any surprise, as every living cell can be described as generating electricity. Early in the twentieth century, the Indian biologist J. C. Bose published a series of books in which he demonstrated the significant role that electricity plays in the ...
  • New Discoveries, New Directions – Introducing a new blog By Paul Kieniewicz (SMN Website Editor) In launching this blog, I am going back to some of the key ideas discussed in founding the Network over forty years ago. In those days, parapsychology was, as it is today, a disreputable field. Outside publications of the Society for Psychical Research and others dedicated to the field, mainstream ...
  • Transcending the Brain – At least some cases of physical damage are associated with enriched consciousness or cognitive skill Despite significant advances in neuroscience, consciousness remains a vexing mystery. Because the qualities of experience seem to be irreducible to physical parameters,1 a hypothesis that has been garnering attention is that consciousness is fundamental and spatially unbound, the brain corresponding to a dissociation or localization of its contents.2At first sight, simple observation seems to contradict ...
  • HRH Prince of Wales Address to the Going Beyond Medicine Conference The theme was ‘Going Beyond Medicine’ and the programme focused on different ways of improving health and wellbeing from self-management, social prescribing, complementary therapies to innovate digital ideas to put patients at the heart of sustainable care. HRH Prince of Wales addressed the conference in a seven minute film, in a talk that ranged from integrated ...
  • Making it Darker Vera de Chalambert, spiritual storyteller and Harvard-educated scholar of comparative religion offers a unique view of the recent US Presidential Election. Donald Trump’s election cannot be explained by politics alone. It involved the awakening of the archetype of Kali, the Dark Mother, destroyer of illusions. Last year, Kali, the Hindu Goddess of death, destruction and resurrection, appeared ...
  • The Self Does Not Die: 104 Cases of Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences The Self Does Not Die: 104 Cases of Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences — Rudolf Smit, 2016 IANDS Conference Claims of paranormal phenomena/experiences during Near-Death Experiences are not just purely subjective. There are cases of NDE in which a third party (partner, relative, friend or medical professional) directly confirms these claims, rather than only through ...
  • Spirituality in Psychiatry for Today’s World Video produced by the RCPsych’s Spirituality and Psychiatry Special Interest Group:
  • Left brain stands guard while sleeping away from home Away from home, people sleep with one ear open. In unfamiliar surroundings, part of the left hemisphere keeps watch while the rest of the brain is deeply asleep, scientists report April 21 in Current Biology. The results help explain why the first night in a hotel isn’t always restful. Some aquatic mammals and birds sleep with half ...
  • New Study Shows Energy Healing Modality May Affect Gene Expression IONS scientist Dr. Garret Yount, along with collaborator Dr. Dawson Church, is doing a series of exciting experiments on the effects of Emotion Freedom Techniques (EFT) on biochemistry and gene expression. EFT is a noninvasive technique that uses elements of cognitive therapy and exposure therapy, and combines them with acupressure. It is one of several modalities ...
  • New Experiments Show Consciousness Affects Matter – Dean Radin Ph.D Dean Radin speaks at the Science of Consciousness Conference in Tuscon 2016. Dean Radin Ph.D is chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS).
  • The Mystery of Perception During Near Death Experiences – Pim van Lommel – (Video) PIM VAN LOMMEL, MD Cardiologist/Author In our prospective study of 344 patients who survived cardiac arrest we had to come to the surprising conclusion that all the reported elements of a Near-Death Experience (NDE) like an out-of-body perception, meeting with deceased relatives or a life review were experienced during a transient functional loss of the cortex and ...
  • My Experience of Publishing Positive Health PH Online for >22 Years David Lorimer’s invitation to describe the impact of publishing Positive Health PH Online for >22 years has provoked within me an intense period of reflection and introspection. Twenty-two+  years is, after all, a fairly long time in one person’s life. Technologically speaking, thinking back to pre-1994, this was just about the very onset of emails; ...
  • New PSI Encyclopedia The Psi Encyclopedia is a new collection of articles and case studies about psi research, the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena. It’s a work in progress, being created by the Society for Psychical Research in London. The Psi Encyclopedia exists largely thanks to the generosity of Nigel Buckmaster, who willed a sum of money to the Society for ...
  • Mysterianism or “Will science ever understand consciousness?” In a recent interview with journalist Wim Kayzer, string theorist Edward Witten says consciousness will remain a mystery that we may never solve. Thus he joins Roger Penrose, Clin McGinn and others who assert that the scientific method has limits to what it can explain in terms of other known quantities, using scientific reductionism. And ...
  • Medical Reversals – When medical advice goes wrong Should you take Hormone Replacement Therapy? Avoid eating peanuts while pregnant to lower the risk of peanut allergy in your child? Take a daily dose of Statins to lower your cholesterol? The answers are often by no means clear despite published medical studies. To complicate the issues, according to a recent New Scientist report, a ...
  • Kosmos Journal Call for Essays – In Harmony with All Life Editor’s note: Provided below is the original message shared by Kosmos with the details about submission requirements. Dear Friends of Kosmos, Twice a year Kosmos invites our readers to submit an essay up to 830 words. We choose two or three essays to publish in our hard copy Kosmos Journal and several others in Kosmos Online and ...
  • Science and Human Rights Is there a relationship between how we perceive human beings (biological machines vs. spiritual beings) and in the way we treat each other? Are die-hard materialists who see human beings are nothing but biological machines more likely to be tolerant of torture, euthanasia and selling human organs for profit? If human beings are nothing but ...
  • Ways of Knowing and Unknowing This was the keynote lecture delivered by Fr. Laurence at the 2012 Mystics and Scientists conference on Western contemplative traditions.   We are, each of us, the product of a union of opposites. Perhaps we enjoy, for an instant after our personal big bang, a fleeting experience of unity which haunts and entices us throughout our life, ...
SSE1

Call for Papers – 2019 SSE Conference

The theme for the 38th annual meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration will be *Consilience*: Developing the Foundations of a New Scientific Paradigm.* /*Consilience refers to the principle that evidence from unrelated sources, especially science and the humanities, can converge and produce unified conclusions./ The conference will take place […]

Diamonds from Heaven: A 20 year psychedelic journey

In this presentation I will share some of the boundaries crossed and lessons learned in my 20 year psychedelic journey reported in Diamonds from Heaven (forthcoming). Seventy-three high dose LSD sessions conducted between 1979-1999 became the philosophical adventure of a lifetime, but one I had to keep largely hidden from […]

Online Courses

The Blind Can See During Near Death Experiences

In their book Mindsight, Dr. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper report on in-depth interviews with 31 people who were fully or partially blind and had a near-death experience where they could see. One of their subjects was Vicki Noratuk who had been blind from birth when she was involved in a car […]

Electromagnetic Waves

Harnessing the Bioelectric Potential of Cells for Regeneration

Michael Levin, biologist at Tufts university discusses the role of electricity in healing and regeneration of lost organs or limbs. In a series of remarkable experiments, he showed how organisms contain information on how to heal wounds or regenerate limbs. In one experiment, by changing the voltage of certain cells, he […]

Glow Of The Mind

Further Reaches of Consciousness Research

“I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter is derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” – Max Planck Consciousness is one of the hottest topics in science, which is why we established the interdisciplinary Beyond the Brain […]

Larry Dossey presentation

Is the Soul Obsolete? Video Presentation by Larry Dosseyblo

Dr. Larry Dossey is an internal medicine physician, former Chief of Staff of Medical City Dallas Hospital, and former co-chairman of the Panel on Mind/Body Interventions, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health. He is executive editor of the peer-previewed journal Explore: The Journal of Science […]

Dying is Unexpectedly Positive

Anyone who has sat at the bedside of a person who is terminally ill will notice that as death approaches, the subject often feels a burst of positive emotions. Contrary to our popular culture, where death is seen as frightening, something to be avoided, the dying don’t necessarily feel that […]

Digital Media and Early Child Development

Editorial by Paul Kieniewicz Anyone visiting their child’s classroom today will be impressed at how the computer, and other digital media have established themselves as teaching / learning tools. A recent New York Times article, How Google Took over the Classroom, relates how much of this advance is driven by […]

Michael Persinger

Michael Persinger on the Neurology of NDEs

What happens in the brain during a Near Death Experience? Does an EEG flat-line mean that there is no brain activity during a NDE? Alex Tsakiris questions neurologist Michael Persinger on his views about NDEs, neurological research and veridical events reported by NDE patients. Persinger, a researcher at Laurentian University […]