New Books and Media

From the publisher’s website: Spectres of the Self is a fascinating study of the rich cultures surrounding the experience of seeing ghosts in England from the Reformation to the twentieth century. Shane McCorristine examines a vast range of primary and secondary sources, showing how ghosts, apparitions, and hallucinations were imagined, experienced, and debated from the pages of fiction to the case reports of the Society for Psychical Research. By analysing a broad range of themes from telepathy and ghost-hunting to the notion of dreaming while awake and the question of why ghosts wore clothes, Dr McCorristine reveals the sheer variety of ideas of ghost seeing in English society and culture. He shows how the issue of ghosts remained dynamic despite the advance of science and secularism and argues that the ghost ultimately represented a spectre of the self, a symbol of the psychological hauntedness of modern experience.
 
 Incorporates literature, psychiatry and popular belief, presenting a variety of ideas about ghost-seeing • Compares contexts from Germany, France and America, providing an international understanding of the topic • Examines the culture of ghost-seeing rather than the validity of ghost-belief
 
Contents: Introduction; Part I. The Dreams of the Ghost-Seers: 1. The haunted mind, 1750–1850; 2. Seeing is believing?: Ghost-seeing and hallucinatory experience; Part II. A Science of the Soul: 3. Ghost-hunting in the Society for Psychical Research; 4. Phantasms of the living and the dead; 5. The concept of hallucination in late-Victorian psychology; Epilogue: towards 1920; Appendix; Bibliography.

Further information is to be found on the publisher's website: Spectres of the Self.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the author’s website: Have you ever wondered where on earth your life is going?  Are you trying to live a spiritual life but feeling lost?  The gurus and teachers tell us that we are “guided” – but how can we recognise and understand this guidance?  This remarkable book describes in detail hundreds of examples of synchronicities and prophetic dreams.  For the first time, here is sound and documented evidence that every one of us can receive  enuine spiritual guidance. This book asks profound questions about the true nature of human consciousness.

From the publisher’s website: This is the first biographical and critical study in English of one of the outstanding mediums of all time, through whom more than 450 books were received by 'automatic writing' over a seventy year period, few of which until recently were available in English translations. 
 
Extracts from some of Chico's major works are included, and give an idea of the scope and the high quality of the output of this unique medium, whose centenary in 2010 was marked by numerous celebrations, two feature films and a special postage stamp. This book tells the fascinating story of how a primary-school dropout from a poor working-class background rose to become a national hero.

This book has been reviewed by Roy Stemman in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 75(2).

From the publisher’s website: As a cardiologist, Pim van Lommel was struck by the number of his patients who claimed to have near-death experiences as a result of their heart attacks. As a scientist, this was difficult for him to accept: Wouldn't it be scientifically irresponsible of him to ignore the evidence of these stories? Faced with this dilemma, van Lommel decided to design a research study to investigate the phenomenon under the controlled environment of a cluster of hospitals with a medically trained staff. 
 
For more than twenty years van Lommel systematically studied such near-death experiences in a wide variety of hospital patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In 2001, he and his fellow researchers published his study on near-death experiences in the renowned medical journal The Lancet. The article caused an international sensation as it was the first scientifically rigorous study of this phenomenon. Now available for the first time in English, van Lommel offers an in-depth presentation of his results and theories in this book that has already sold over 125,000 copies in Europe.
 
Van Lommel provides scientific evidence that the near-death phenomenon is an authentic experience that cannot be attributed to imagination, psychosis, or oxygen deprivation. He further reveals that after such a profound experience, most patients' personalities undergo a permanent change. In van Lommel's opinion, the current views on the relationship between the brain and consciousness held by most physicians, philosophers, and psychologists are too narrow for a proper understanding of the phenomenon. In Consciousness Beyond Life, van Lommel shows that our consciousness does not always coincide with brain functions and that, remarkably and significantly, consciousness can even be experienced separate from the body.

From the publisher’s website: Dowsing - The Ultimate Guide for the 21st Century is a book for its time. It brings the undoubted benefits of this ancient art to a modern world, and makes dowsing, and its unlimited applications, accessible and relevant for all.

Find out what dowsing is; who can do it; how to do it; when and where it works. Learn about the pioneering scientific discoveries that explain the mechanics of dowsing. Understand how dowsing can become an invaluable tool to optimise your own health, well-being, and quality of life, by giving you the means to discern truth from non-truth, and to identify what is, and what is not, in your individual best interests.

And at this pivotal time in the evolution of human consciousness, discover how dowsing physically demonstrates on a tangible level the existence of an invisible world of energy outside the one we perceive with our five senses - and our ability to connect with it.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher's website: A young man of Dublin walks past a row of streetlights at night–and they go out, one by one, as he passes.  An engineer in Woodville, Washington, is stopped by police and his car searched to find out what he's doing to their streetlights.  An Australian in the entertainment industry parks his car in a parking lot, and the light above him goes out–until the following evening when he parks in precisely the same space and the light comes on again.

And that's not all. When a guest in a restaurant in Athens, Greece, asks that the music be turned down, they refuse–whereupon she "kills" the restaurant's electricity and they eat the rest of their meal by candlelight. Other people affect traffic lights, computers, railway crossings...

This is Street Light Interference (SLI). Once considered to be folklore–something that happened to a friend of a friend–today it is recognized as a scientific enigma with implications for our knowledge of the universe, including ourselves. In this, the first full-length book on SLI, we hear from some of the hundreds of SLIders who have reported their uncanny experiences, and consider the wider implications of this fascinating phenomenon.

From the publisher’s website: Can hands-on healing can cure cancer? Skeptics say no. One man’s research — in 10 controlled, university experiments with cancer-injected mice — shows that it does. This is a self-proclaimed skeptical scientist’s story.

With The Energy Cure, Dr. William Bengston presents astonishing evidence that challenges us to totally rethink what we believe about our ability to heal. Drawing on his scientific research, incredible results, and mind-bending questions, Bengston invites us to follow him along his 35-year investigation into the mystery of hands-on healing and to discover a technique that may activate your healing abilities. Part memoir and part instruction, this provocative book explores: Bengston's paradigm-shifting experimental results and why they seem so difficult for some medical practitioners to accept - Image cycling, a unique preparation method for a hands-on-healing treatment - Why traditional Western medicine isn't always best, the value of skepticism, the strengths of energy medicine, and more.

This book has been reviewed by Robert A. Charman in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 75(3).

From the publisher's website: Most scholars dismiss research into the paranormal as pseudoscience, a frivolous pursuit for the paranoid or gullible. Even historians of religion, whose work naturally attends to events beyond the realm of empirical science, have shown scant interest in the subject. But the history of psychical phenomena, Jeffrey J. Kripal contends, is an untapped source of insight into the sacred and by tracing that history through the last two centuries of Western thought we can see its potential centrality to the critical study of religion.

Kripal grounds his study in the work of four major figures in the history of paranormal research: psychical researcher Frederic Myers; writer and humorist Charles Fort; astronomer, computer scientist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee; and philosopher and sociologist Bertrand Méheust. Through incisive analyses of these thinkers, Kripal ushers the reader into a beguiling world somewhere between fact, fiction, and fraud. The cultural history of telepathy, teleportation, and UFOs; a ghostly love story; the occult dimensions of science fiction; cold war psychic espionage; galactic colonialism; and the intimate relationship between consciousness and culture all come together in Authors of the Impossible, a dazzling and profound look at how the paranormal bridges the sacred and the scientific.

From the publisher’s website: The power of the mind has long been debated, debunked, studied for military applications, and used in science fiction. These collected case histories explore the phenomena of levitation, stigmata, inedia, paranormal activity, bilocation, fire immunity, luminosity, and the teleportation of matter. The results of more than a century of formal experimental research are discussed, as are resultant training techniques, theories, and controlled experiments used to test or bolster telekinetic abilities.
 
Pamela Rae Heath, M.D., has written widely about such topics as experiential research, place memory, the afterlife and mind-matter interaction. She is co-founder of the Paranormal Research Organization, and is also a member of the Parapsychological Association, the Society for Psychical Research and the Society for Scientific Exploration. She lives in California.

From the author: Are you aware that there was a time in Greece when scientific research was being conducted on paranormal phenomena? A time when the great majority of Greek people and scientists believed in such experiences, and there were even lessons in the subject (such as experiments in telepathy) on the National University of Greece's curriculum? Few people know about it today, and the remaining records from this era are gradually being lost due to deterioration and ignorance. This fascinating period of parapsychological research in Greece is told through the pages of this book. Testimonies, documents, old photographs, long-forgotten scientific researches and hitherto unpublished information together portray a time that was indeed very different to ours today. This Greek-language book shows a Greece that was full of remarkable research and revolutionary experiments.
 
Plaudits for the book: “A surprisingly good book about a remarkable era in Greece that most people are unaware of. A doctor from the Navy Force, a very rich backer and dozens of researchers and psychic mediums are all becoming part of a paranormal and quite unknown Greece!”  Mystery magazine.
 
“The present book brings to light a not so long ago era where Greece was equally contributing to one of the most challenging expeditions of human science.  The contribution of Angelos Tanagras is worthwhile and has to become known to the wide public in an attempt to find imitators, and as such the Greek participation to the worldwide parapsychological community to be renewed and extended. I do hope that capable people will emerge to follow Nikolaos Koumartzis in his attempt of reviving psychical research in Greece.” Dr. Marios Varvoglis, President of Institut Metapsychique International (France) and Vice President of the Parapsychological Association (USA).

From the official website: Narrated by Britains leading investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre, this award-winning documentary presents four never before seen scientific investigations into life after death.  The Scole Experiment:  For five years a group of researchers and mediums witnessed more phenomena than in any other experiment in the history of the paranormal, including recorded conversations with the dead, written messages on sealed film, video of spirit faces appearing and even spirit forms materializing. The Electronic Voice Phenomenon: Can the dead speak to the living via electronic devices like radios and tape recorders? Scientists investigating Italy's most famous medium, think so. Also famed psychic, Allison Dubois, the inspiration for the hit TV show Medium is put to the test. As our cameras roll, can she contact a leading Scole researcher who tragically died during the production of this film? These experiments may finally convince you there is life after death.

Click here for more information.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: In the New York Times bestseller, Healing Words, Dr. Dossey investigated why patients surrounded by prayer healed faster and more completely than patients who were not. Now, in The Science of Premonitions, Dossey uses cutting-edge science to make a convincing case that premonitions are real, common, and helpful. Then Dossey explores research on mindfulness and meditation to show readers how they can cultivate and take advantage of premonitions. Packed with compelling case studies and thought-provoking findings, this is a book for the skeptical mind and the believer's heart, and will be greeted warmly by "anyone who is interested in knowing about the deeper meaning of our existence."

Review by Gregory M. Westlake.