New Books and Media

From the publisher: There is a rising interest in regions of the mind often traveled solely by shamans, mystics, and visionary artists. In a recent survey by the National Science Foundation, a startling 60% of respondents agreed that “some people possess psychic powers or ESP.” People want to know—what exactly is at the farthest fringes of human consciousness? In the new anthology Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness a diverse group of authors set out to answer that question. This collection of mind-bending essays from the online magazine Reality Sandwich draws readers deep into regions of the mind. In this extraordinary anthology, a wide range of both well established and emerging writers speak out about their encounters with the fringes of the conscious mind, from demons in sleep paralysis visions to psychic research conducted by the CIA. Contributors include notable ESP researcher Russell Targ, parapsychologist Dean Radin, and anthropologist Alberto Villoldo. Organized into sections covering psychic phenomena, synchronicity, lucid dreaming, shamanism, and near death experiences, Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness is more than a series of snapshots of psychic experiences. It ties together its disparate topics to form a larger picture of what these non-ordinary states of consciousness might have to tell us about the nature of reality itself. DANIEL PINCHBECK is the editorial director of Reality Sandwich and cofounder of Evolver.net. He is the author of Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, among other works. KEN JORDAN is the publisher and executive producer of Reality Sandwich and Evolver.net and has written for Wired, Index, and The Paris Review. Pinchbeck and Jordan have coedited two other anthologies, Toward 2012 and What Comes After Money? Both live in New York City. For more information, please visit www.realitysandwich.com and www.evolver.net. EVOLVER EDITIONS is a collaboration between North Atlantic Books and Evolver, LLC. EVOLVER EDITIONS presents leading voices of the transformational movement, the new spiritual counterculture that explores humanity's most visionary potential and the tangible, pragmatic steps we can take to access it.

Review by Graham Kidd

From the author’s website: In paranormal circles across Canada and the United States, the hauntings at The Blue Ghost Tunnel (BGT) frequent the conversation. Often referred to as "The Most Haunted Location" in Canada or a place where you are guaranteed activity, the tunnel is synonymous with historical haunted locations across North America.  I've been investigation the tunnel as a possible haunt for the past 14 years as a solo investigator, with The Niagara Amateur Ghost Seekers and with members of The Shadows Project.

In the late 1990s the tunnel, previously known under various descriptions became popularized as The Blue Ghost Tunnel, the name coined by a young paranormal investigator who is said to have witnessed a "Blue Misty Ghost".  A few years of intense interest on the Internet, multiple investigations and visits by paranormal enthusiasts prompted the once popular TV program Creepy Canada to film at the location.  Together with Ghost Tour Group Haunted Hamilton, questionable psychics and an impromtu "historian" of the tunnel, they exposed the location to tens of thousands of viewers solidifying the legend and suspected haunt.  The episode depicted the tunnel as "700 ft of Hell on Earth!"

As a result of their illegal trespassing and exposure of the location, the site became explosively popular and thousands of visitors each year come to visit the tunnel prompting the Seaway Authority to attempt to secure the location. Even with extensive security, people trek out to discover the BGT for themselves...

But who really discovered this long, lost tunnel?  What is the truth behind the hauntings and experiences at the tunnel?  Is the tunnel an Urban Legend, conjured-up by a young wannabe author?  Are we simply developing our own experiences using our own minds?  Or is the tunnel really haunted? And by whom?

I decided to write about the tunnel, because I am fascinated with legends and lore and how they develop and what truth is hidden within. The book includes interviews, photographs and documents from decades past including the first ever investigation in 1976.  It includes historical accounts from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s with photographs and evidence supporting a number of theories.

 

All proceeds of The Blue Ghost Tunnel: Making of a Legend will go to Dare to Dream Horse Rescue.  Further details are available from here

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: Reveals the evidence of life beyond death; examines 125 years of scientific research into reincarnation, apparitions, and communication with the dead showing these phenomena are real; reveals the existence of higher planes of consciousness where the souls of the dead can choose to advance or manifest once again on Earth; explains how these findings have been ignored and denied because they are incompatible with materialist doctrines

In this book, Chris Carter shows that evidence of life beyond death exists and has been around for millennia, predating any organized religion. Focusing on three key phenomena--reincarnation, apparitions, and communications from the dead--Carter reveals 125 years of documented scientific studies by independent researchers and the British and American Societies for Psychical Research that rule out hoaxes, fraud, and hallucinations and prove these afterlife phenomena are real.

The author examines historic and modern accounts of detailed past-life memories, visits from the deceased, and communications with the dead via medium and automatic writing as well as the scientific methods used to confirm these experiences. He explains how these findings on the afterlife have been ignored and denied because they are incompatible with the prevailing doctrine of materialism. Sharing messages from the dead themselves describing the afterlife, Carter reveals how consciousness exists outside the parameters of biological evolution and emerges through the medium of the brain to use the physical world as a springboard for growth. After death, souls can advance to higher planes of consciousness or manifest once again on Earth. Carter’s rigorous argument proves--beyond any reasonable doubt--not only that consciousness survives death and continues in the afterlife, but that it precedes birth as well.

About the Author: Chris Carter received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Oxford. The author of Science and the Near-Death Experience and Science and Psychic Phenomena, he is originally from Canada and currently teaches internationally.

From the publisher’s website: Throughout the ages, the mystery of what happens when we die and the nature of the human mind has fascinated humankind. In this thoughtful collection of essays, leading scientists and authors contemplate the nature of consciousness, quantum mechanics, string theory, dimensions, space and time, non-local space, the hologram, and the effect of death on the consciousness. Although traditionally considered a matter for philosophical and religious debate, advancements in modern science and in particular the science of resuscitation have now enabled an objective, scientific approach to seek answers to these compelling questions, which bear widespread implications not only for science, but also for all of humanity.

From the Publisher’s website: Regarded by many as the most haunted city in the world; York has over 500 individual spirits and is therefore the perfect destination for five paranormal investigators from Newcastle gathering evidence to answer a question as old as time: Do ghosts actually exist? Allow Rob Kirkup to be your guide on an epic ghost hunting adventure; a year-long quest which will see ten of York's most active venues investigated. Nothing could prepare the team for what they would encounter. From a very unwelcoming phantom at one of the city's premier tourist attractions who literally pushes the team out of 'its” lair, and an angry toilet-dwelling ghost at one of the country's top museums, to the tragic shade of a young girl who speaks to our team at the former site of York's gallows, where many hundreds were executed, including the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin. It's guaranteed to be one hell of an adventure, so utterly terrifying in fact that not all of the team will stay the distance. Illustrated with over 60 photographs, this book is the ultimate ghostly guide to the scariest city on Earth.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: What Linneaus did for biology, LeShan does for human consciousness and behaviour — provide a classification system for aspects and states of consciousness. This framework contains both the objective and subjective aspects of life and shows that they can be intelligibly connected. Table of Contents: You and Your World Pictures: How Things Are and Work Consciousness and World Pictures The First Classification System: The Realms of Consciousness The Realms of a World Picture Some Implications of the Classification System: Technology and World Pictures Dealing with the World Pictures of Terrorists: The Problem of Fundamentalism World Pictures and the Structure of Consciousness The Realms of Consciousness and our Frequent, Strange and Inconsistent Behavior The Roads To Truth The New Beginning Appendix I — Where Does Consciousness Come From? Appendix II — A Dialogue Concerning World Pictures Lawrence LeShan published his first professional paper in 1942. Since then he has authored over 150 papers and 20 books, which have been translated into 19 languages. He holds a PhD in Human development from the University of Chicago, has taught at various universities and has lectured and given seminars widely in this country, Europe and elsewhere. He has worked as a research psychologist for over 60 years including six years as a psychologist in the U.S. Army.

Review by Robert Charman

From the publisher’s website:

Contents

Foreword - Robert Van de Castle

Introduction - Anthropology and the Paranormal - Jack Hunter

Chapter 1 - The Anthropology of the Possible: The Ethnographer as Sceptical Enquirer - Lee Wilson

Chapter 2 - Reflecting on Paranthropology - Mark A. Schroll

Chapter 3 - Transpersonal Anthropology: What is it, and What are the Problems we Face in Doing it? - Charles D. Laughlin

Chapter 4 - Devising Methods for the Ethnographic Study of the Afterlife: Cognition, Empathy and Engagement - Fiona Bowie

Chapter 5 - Anthropology, Evolution and Anomalous Experience - James McClenon

Chapter 6 - Money God Cults in Taiwan: A Paranthropological Approach - Fabian Graham

Chapter 7 - The Effect of Meditation Attainment on Psychic Awareness: Research With Yogis and Tibetan Buddhists - Serena Roney-Dougal

Chapter 8 - Dreams and Telepathic Communication - David E. Young

Chapter 9 - Experiential Reclamation and First-Person Parapsychology - David Luke

Afterword - Paradigms and Methodologies for Anomalous Research - Michael Winkelman

See http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/anthology.html

From the publisher’s website: “Mark Edward is an equivocator, fibber, and mountebank. Which begs the question: if a liar admits to lying, can he be telling the truth? He is a literate, informative, intellectual, a student of the psychology of humans, a foe of those who would defraud the public for personal gain, and as an author and practicing psychic, he is first and foremost an entertainer.”—Joel Moskowitz, International Brotherhood of Magicians

Mark Edward confesses that for years he exploited believers who wished to connect with supernatural ideas and sad family members who missed dead loved ones.

Edward is a professional mentalist who has worked the Magic Castle in Hollywood for over thirty years and is also on the Editorial Board of Skeptic magazine, where he has worked with other critical thinkers to reveal the methods of psychic scamsters. This entertaining book is at once confessional and instructional regarding human belief and those who exploit it.  Edward believes that most practitioners of the psychic business are out-and-out scam artists, and that the common need to believe in things supernatural is merely a part of human nature.

From the publisher’s website: Are you out of your body? At least part of you may be, if consciousness can extend beyond the brain in your skull. In Science and Spirit, authors Charles F. Emmons and Penelope Emmons explore some intriguing questions: What evidence is there for consciousness apart from the body, and what evidence is there for survival of consciousness after bodily death? Through ethnographic interviews with scientists, observations at conferences, and visits to research institutes, they investigate the existence and meaning of ESP, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, reincarnation, spirit mediumship, lucid dreaming, and ghost experiences. In this study, they share a variety of scientific frames for looking at these questions and happenings, and they disclose their own paranormal experiences. Science and Spirit uses a unique blend of strong academic and scientific theory and methodology and applies it to the examination of paranormal topics. Charles F. Emmons is a sociologist at Gettysburg College. His books include Chinese Ghosts and ESP, At the Threshold, and Guided by Spirit. He appears on the Ghosts of Gettysburg television show, and he is a member of Exploring the Extraordinary and of the Society for Scientific Exploration . Penelope Emmons, MSW, LSW, is a psychotherapist with a counseling and coaching practice in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She coauthored Guided by Spirit. Emmons has facilitated metaphysical workshops in the United States and Canada and is also a Mandala Assessment Research Instrument practitioner and instructor, a healer, and a spirit medium.

 

A lively collection of ghost stories from the seventeenth century to the present. Britain is full of ghostly stories – from the wraith of John Donne’s wife to the Cock Lane poltergeist. Gillian Bennett has collected together the 100 best tales told to frighten and enthral over the last four centuries. Famous hauntings and familiar legends are combined with unusual and long-lost accounts of apparitions, boggarts, black dogs and ‘unhappy houses’ in this new collection.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the authors: The idea contained within this book is that what humankind calls ghosts or spectres are in fact a manifestation of a fundamental aspect of nature that is for the most part very much hidden from our everyday viewpoint, but that is perfectly explicable in itself. Indeed once the mechanisms are understood there is nothing very mystical or very mysterious about these phenomena.  In order to demonstrate this fact the book contains some 500 digital camera images that show certain patterns which provide pictorial evidence for the intellectual ideas which are described in the text. These images, (that we happen to call para-pics, a shortened version of paranormal pictures), have been captured by a life-long psychic (TL) using certain specialised techniques.

From the publisher’s website: This book sheds light on some of the most baffling paranormal experiences. It maps the mind-bending geography of the human psyche and the spectrum of experiences that influence it.  The book features accessibly written essays by the most eminent scholars in a field constantly sullied by frauds and dismissed by sceptics. The paranormal has exerted a strange fascination over humankind for centuries. In Seriously Strange, the second volume in the Boundaries of Consciousness series edited by Sudhir Kakar and Jeffrey D. Kripal, a group of nine intellectuals come together to shed light on some of the most baffling experiences on record of psychical experiences. Through these illuminating essays, they tell us how such extraordinary events can be decoded and interpreted to become the object of rigorous scientific study.

The range is wide: from essays that reveal how Freud and Jung engaged with the notion of the paranormal to a provocative and humorous memoir of a physicist who spent over a decade running a secret psychic spying programme for the US government during the Cold War (Edwin C May ran a secret psychic spying programme, known as Star Gate, for the US government. He recounts the project’s successes, as he sees them. May is perhaps the world’s only person who has enjoyed a 20-year, full-time job with industrial wages plus health and retirement benefits in which his only responsibility was Extra Sensory Perception [ESP] research and its applications). There are also heartfelt accounts by practising psychiatrists who recount the dramatic effects of the anomalous in their healing practice to a learned call for the renewal of professional parapsychology in the light of Patanjali’s Yoga-sutras. By telling their own stories and exploring some of the implications of their work, these men and women throw light on the spectrum of experiences such as love and death, desire and sex, hurt and healing, myth and magic that influence the human psyche.  By telling their own stories and exploring some of the implications of their work, these men and women map the mind-bending geography of the human psyche and the spectrum of experiences, love and death, desire and sex, hurt and healing, myth and magic, that influence it.