Clairvoyance, remote viewing, and NDEs

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell writes: “Whereas telepathy implies coupling one’s consciousness with that of another conscious being, clairvoyance is visualizing distant or hidden images as though one had a psychic telescope, periscope, or camera. Clairvoyance (sometimes called remote viewing) has reportedly found oil, mineral deposits, hidden treasure, and missing people. It has also been reported to diagnose medical and mechanical problems by seeing inside ill people and malfunctioning machines.

“There are at least two different types of clairvoyant experiences. For some the images arise from their unconscious just as telepathic thoughts do. The image can come spontaneously in a flash, or can evolve over time while the person concentrates on retrieving it. In the other type, clairvoyant experiences occur in what are called ‘out-of-body experiences’ (OBEs).

“Edgar Cayce (1877-1943) is considered the ‘father of holistic medicine; because his recommendations form the basis for much of the holistic medicine still practiced. Starting in 1901, Edgar Cayce did more than 14,000 clairvoyant readings based solely upon the client’s name and address. He told his secretary about his visions while still in a self-induced OBE. Of these readings, more than 9,400 concerned medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations.

“In 1910 Cayce’s reading for ‘Dr. Wesley Ketchum, a reputable homeopath,’ revealed his condition was due to a pinched spinal nerve, not appendicitis—as Ketchum thought and other doctors confirmed. Ketchum submitted a paper on Cayce’s readings to the American Society of Clinical Research, and The New York Times published an article with the headline: ‘Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.’

“The psychologist Gina Cerminara spent a year studying records of his readings and wrote her conclusions in Many Mansions (1967). She found that many readings were extremely accurate and the clients improved after following Cayce’s recommendations.

“The physician Norman Shealy researched medical intuition in the 1980s with the medical intuitive Caroline Myss. Their study involved fifty patients who individually sat in Shealy’s consultation room while Myss made diagnoses based upon their names and birth dates from her office twelve hundred miles away. She felt that the physical distance was an advantage because personal connections with patients sometimes blocked her ability. The results are described in their book The Creation and Health (1988). Shealy reported that Myss had an overall accuracy of 93 percent. Examples of diagnoses Myss and Shealy made in common were schizophrenia, migraine headaches, myofascial pain, depression, sexual problems, venereal herpes, back pain, anxiety, wasting of the brain or Alzheimer’s, and epilepsy.1

“Research on remote viewing was done at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two former laser physicists, and Edwin C. May, a former nuclear physicist. The federal government funded SRI’s research during the Cold War, because United States intelligence was concerned about the Soviet Union’s involvement in psychic research.

“Initially the SRI studies were done with Ingo Swann and Pat Price. Swann was a New York artist known for psychic abilities who wrote a book called Natural ESP (1987). Price was a retired police commissioner from Burbank, California, who for years had used his psychic abilities to solve crimes. Both Swann and Price became adept at accurately describing distant locations without an observer by being told the location’s latitude and longitude or its address.

“The researchers wondered if there was a physical limit to the distance for successful remote viewing. To test this, Swann was asked in 1973 to draw Jupiter just before a NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. He sketched a ring around Jupiter, which was considered an error until NASA discovered Jupiter’s ring.

“Another result was also considered a mistake at first. Price’s drawing of a site in Palo Alto contained some resemblance to the target, but it was less accurate than typical for him. Years later, Targ read an article about the history of that site. The article included a picture that looked just like Price’s. The site had been a water processing plant fifty years before the experiment. Structures from the past had been incorporated into Price’s picture. Targ concluded that remote viewing isn’t limited to present time.

“One of the best viewers at SRI was Joe McMoneagle. While stationed in Germany he had a near-death experience (NDE). His heightened psychic abilities appeared afterward, which is not an unusual story.

“A total of 411 remote viewing trials were conducted and published over a twenty-five-year period at Princeton University by a psychologist, Brenda Dunne, and an emeritus dean of engineering, Robert Jahn. Like Targ and Puthoff, they found that distance between the target and the viewer didn’t matter. However, their success rate declined over the years as the subjects became bored with the experiments and received less feedback on their accuracy. This diminution of accuracy over time has been one reason scientists have been skeptical of the phenomenon.

“The SRI research has led to several conclusions about remote viewing. For one, accuracy and resolution do not appear to be affected by distance. This is very unusual for any kind of signal processing since electromagnetic signals become weaker with distance. Since the Faraday cage did not interfere, it is even less likely that the mechanism involves electromagnetic waves. So the brains of psychics probably don’t receive electromagnetic signals like our televisions and cell phones.2

“Another conclusion was that study results were less accurate when the psychics knew the target possibilities. As in telepathy, one’s preconceptions or expectations can adversely affect results by engaging the brain’s analytical capacities. Everything suggests that psychic material becomes available first to the nonanalytical unconscious.

“Many SRI ‘controls’ were capable of remote viewing, so another conclusion was that it may be a latent ability in all of us. Psychic abilities are like motor skills and become perfected when the analytical mind isn’t in charge of their execution.”3

1 See Mona Lisa Schultz, Awakening Intuition (1999).

2 “A Faraday cage is a hollow conductor, in which the charge remains on the external surface of the cage.” https://science.howstuffworks.com/faraday-cage.htm. Remote viewers in these experiments were inside a Faraday cage, which means they couldn’t have utilized electromagnetic fields for their remote viewing.

3 Powell, The ESP Enigma, 46-71.

 

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

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Emotion makes telepathy more discernible

Psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell reports that René Warcollier, a twentieth century chemical engineer, “became interested in telepathy after he had a series of telepathic dreams.” His research led him to conclude: “the brain’s circuitry for dreaming is involved.” Emotional stimuli seem to be more discernible through telepathy than nonemotional stimuli. And distinguishing form and color “can be separated in telepathic imagery,” as in dreams “which frequently are in black and white. Warcollier found, as well, that the rational mind interfered with accuracy, and in dreaming the rational mind is absent or muted. Also, the perceived images were often condensed, as images are in dreams.”1

“If people experience concurrent and identical changes in brain activity,” Powell writes, “when only one of the pair is given a stimulus, this would suggest a coupling of consciousness. Research by Marilyn Schlitz and Dean Radin was done on twenty-six pairs of volunteers, whose brainwaves were measured by EEG simultaneously while they were in separate rooms. If one of the pair was shown video images, the other pair member had corresponding EEG changes, as though the images were shown to him or her as well. Some of this work showed positive results even when the pair were strangers, provided they had spent an hour or so together to form a bond, which can happen with effort within this relatively short period of time.” 2

 

“Other research suggests that the brain may not be the only body part involved in telepathy. A more primitive ‘brain,’ or neural network, in the gut is thought to be involved in emotional responses, or ‘gut reactions,’ which can occur independent of the brain. The gut contains more than 100 million neurons and is the only organ other than the brain with such a complex neural network.

 

“The research studies discussed here give results that are statistically significant by scientific standards. Telepathy has been reported to be more common in creative people. Perhaps telepathy, like creativity, usually happens spontaneously and is difficult to turn on with the flick of a switch.” 3

 

Telepathy, of course, is the standard means of communication during near-death experiences, when the sensory systems of the body are not available. Moreover, telepathy has been widely reported by anthropologists and other Westerners who have observed indigenous peoples, at least prior to their exposure to modern technology and its mechanistic forms of communication.

Barbara E writes of her near-death experience: The next thing I knew I was mildly aware of hurling through a tunnel type atmosphere. Then I was situated in the midst of a startling, seemingly alive, white, white light. Still feeling a bit stunned and confused, I wondered. 'Where am I, what is going on?' Then it hit me. I thought to myself, 'oh shoot (not exactly the word, if you get my drift), I must be dead!'

Almost simultaneous with that realization, it seemed as if the light penetrated throughout me and I felt the most magnificent warmth, peace, and acceptance imaginable. I felt awe. Loved and cradled. It was clear that the light loved me so completely, knew me through and through, had no hesitance in accepting my foibles and weaknesses, and felt quite a bit of humor about how seriously I took myself and my life.

As I settled into the love without condition, I realized more and more how utterly and absolutely intelligent light was. The sheer level of creativity and intellect was emotionally and psychologically beyond comprehension. I knew that because light was telepathically melded with me, allowing me to sense at least a minute degree of what was contained within. There was so much thought and information that it felt as if zillions of scrolls of data about the true nature of reality just kept unraveling. I was lost and overwhelmed and had no comprehension of what it all meant. Yet the central message came through loud and clear. Reality is SO much larger, multi-layered and multi-dimensional than we realize. Consciousness is able to experience so much more than what we commonly practice. Everything has purpose and meaning.  

From NDERF.org

1 Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma, 7-8, 37-39.

2 Dean Radin, The Noetic Universe (2009).

3 Ibid., 41-45.

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

The scientific case for psychic phenomena

Diane Hennacy Powell is a practicing psychiatrist and researcher. She is currently studying autistic savants, who have abilities similar to psychic phenomena. Both savants and psychics experience patterns of anomalous knowing that cannot be explained by the modern paradigm that consciousness is simply the result of brain activity.

She writes: “I find joy in integrating information across these scientific disciplines, both in search of solutions for patients, and to build evidence-based theories to explain conundrums that mystify us. While in San Diego I co-created and directed The McCandless Center for Women, a program treating survivors of sexual assault, and was the first psychiatrist for Survivors of Torture, International.”* 

Powell does not claim to have had an NDE, but in The ESP Enigma she does include the following observation and memory: “Time perception also is altered when we come close to death. I directly observed this when I almost drowned at the age of thirteen in a canoe accident. The passage of time seemed to slow down shortly after I stopped struggling against the river’s current and resigned myself to dying. At the same time my entire life passed rapidly through my mind.” Certainly, this experience shares some of the characteristics that NDE survivors report.

Powell begins her book, The ESP Enigma, with another memory at the age of thirteen: “From twenty feet across the room, the magician read, word for word, the contents of any book that I randomly chose from among hundreds on the bookshelves. There were no mirrors behind me, and I knew that these books belonged to my friend, not the magician. Even if he had memorized all of the books, he would also have needed exceptional luck to guess which pages I chose. There was no rational explanation at the time for what I observed, but it fostered a deep, abiding curiosity.”

“My interest,” she writes, “led me to study neuroscience in college and specialize in neuropsychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. While on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, I encountered a patient who claimed to be psychic. She then told me several accurate details about my life and made specific predictions about my future, all of which eventually came true. So, I decided to systematically investigate psychic phenomena. And over the past twenty years I have gained invaluable insight from patients who shared details of their psychic experiences.”

* “Meet Dr. Powell,” http://dianehennacypowell.com/meet-dr-powell/

Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (Walker Publishing Company, 2009).

God is in the creative possibility of each moment

“The gospel of John," biologist Charles Birch writes, presents: “a picture of everything being alive with Life from the very beginning. Such is this particular biblical interpretation of the creative process. It was personal from the beginning, but that only becomes fully evident in the light of its manifestation in human persons. Always it was transcendent to the world. Always it was involved with the world, drawing the world to itself, brooding over the face of the earth.”

“This light flickered uncertainly within the church as it wavered from commitment to a view of the total involvement of God in the world to one restricted to humans alone. In the process both humanity and nature lost out, for neither nature, humanity nor God can be understood alone.”

“To love is to be the recipient of love and to return love. Is the God of love an exception to this principle? On the contrary, God’s love must be responsive, or it is not love at all. Indeed, a God whose influence is divorced form responsiveness and sensitivity is irresponsible. Without that aspect of God’s nature nothing is saved after the world comes to its end in a fiery furnace of the sun or in a frozen waste.”

“The divine passion is God’s feeling of the world as the world is created. As every entity ‘feels’ the lure of God and responds to that lure then God becomes concretely real in a way God was not concretely real before. And that new reality makes a difference to God. God is the one who cherishes all: ‘unto whom all hearts are open,’ says the collect. With each creative advance, be it in cosmic evolution or in an individual life, God becomes different. Every individual experience has its consequence in the life of God.”

As the cosmos evolves: “God as divine Eros, transcendent to the universe, becomes immanent within the new creation. This is God’s presence in the world. In addition, the world is present in God as the divine Passion responds to each new creation and each existing one. This is not the image of the world as a contrivance and God as the artificer working from a pre-planned blueprint of the future. It is an image of the world as organically related to God who provides the purposes and values of creation moment by moment yet leaves the creation with its degree of freedom and self-determination. In this sense the future is not determined. It is open-ended. The possibilities of creativity are immense, but not all possibilities are relevant at any particular stage of the evolving cosmos. We are caught in the web of history. Yet our future is still open-ended within the realm of possibilities relevant to that history.”

“In the worlds of the Jewish scholar Abraham J. Heschel, ‘God is waiting for us to redeem the world.’ For us to fail to respond to the forward call of life is not just a personal failure. It is a cosmic tragedy.”

“The whole organizes and even creates the parts. The lower levels of organization are to be interpreted in terms of the higher. This principle is recognized in recent developments in quantum physics. It has validity over the whole spectrum of individuals from protons to people. The basic principle is this: we understand what is not ourselves by analogy with what we know ourselves to be.”

"The heavenly city of the Enlightenment has not arrived. We still have with us ‘children of darkness’ who are evil because they know no law beyond self. Their wisdom is that they understand the power of self-interest. The ‘children of light’ are wise because they believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law."

What is this higher law? It is not the authority of any individual, group or institution. It is not any created good at all. These all tend to become idols. It is the source of all good, the source of all creativity. The moral and spiritual resources for a just, peaceful and sustainable global society are pressing daily upon us, seeking entry into life and blocked only by self-interest. There is a way through. Repentance is still possible.”

 

Charles Birch, The Purpose in Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).

Evolving: a cosmic life, a divine life, life on earth

Biologist Charles Birch (1918-2009) in A Purpose for Everything writes: “Either we and the rest of the creation have no permanent value or else we may say that there is a cosmic life, a divine life, able to appropriate and retain as experiences in its life our lesser lives and that of other individuals of creation. Either we and the rest live for what transcends ourselves or we live without ultimate meaning and ultimate purpose."

"To have self-determination is to exhibit mind. It is to have some degree of freedom, no doubt minute at the molecular level. I am not saying that having investigated the life of the cell and its molecules biologist have found mind. What they have found is more consistent with the proposition that the cell as an entity and the DNA molecule as an entity have internal relations."

"There is but one theory, known to me, that casts any positive light on the ability of brain cells to furnish us with feelings. It is that brain cells can feel! What gives brain cells feelings? It is by the same logic that we may say—their molecules. And so on down the line to those individuals we call electrons, protons and the like. The theory is that things that feel are made of things that feel."

"Because of the unity of life, human love is something that can be extended to the whole creation. The humanist loves his fellow humans and appreciates nature. The ecological model of life implies that human love is to be extended to the rest of nature in the sense of sympathetic identification with the life of other sentient organisms."

"The old notion of a divine being controlling the universe from outside is no longer credible. The relevant question now is, in what sense, if any, is there divine activity in the universe."

"The power of the Christian gospel is the experience of divine love that transforms life. We experience God first and then spend the rest of our lives trying to understand that experience and its relevance to the whole world. The God of the universe touches us as we experience life in its fullness. But God is vaster than our experience. When I go down to the ocean and swim on its shore, I get to know one part of the ocean—its near end. But there is a vast extent of ocean way beyond my ken that is nevertheless continuous with that bit of the ocean I know. So it is with God. We touch God at the near end, yet that same God extends into the farthest reaches of the universe and there too is pervasive love. This is the full meaning of incarnation. The universe exists by its incarnation of God in itself. It is the sort of universe in which God can be incarnate. God could not be incarnate in a machine! The divine Eros works in the universe through influence (literally meaning inflowing) as its universal mode of causation."

"To see the universe as a whole in this way, with the same God working in the universe at large, and in the life of Jesus, and in the lives of all of us, was put in highly symbolic language by the apostle Paul in his letter about the ‘Cosmic Christ’ in Colossians 1. In verse 4 is the phrase ‘In him all things hang together.’ This affirmation is repeated no less than five times in this chapter. It was Paul’s conviction that the same spirit which was in Jesus animated the whole universe. The universal principle of reality is the free act of experiencing. For many people in his time the world was a dualism. Not so for Paul. God is the God of ‘all things.’ Nature as well as human history is the theater of grace."

 

Charles Birch, A Purpose for Everything: Religion in a Postmodern Worldview (Twenty-Third Publications, 1990).

Spiritual: "A City Called Heaven"

I am a pilgrim, a pilgrim of sorrow,  

I’m left in this wide world, this wide world a-lone.

I have no hope, have no hope for to-morrow.  

But I'm tryin’ to make heaven my home.

Sometimes I’m tossed, Lord, and sometimes I’m driven.

Sometimes I just don’t know, just where I’m to go.

But I’ve heard of a city, the city of heaven.

And I’m tryin’ to make heaven my home.

 

Renaissance, Bethel University’s Performing Arts Experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjA3mesoAVU

Adrianne G's NDE (translated from Spanish)

In 2005, I went to the hospital because I tried to drink a cup of coffee and where I thought it was, I couldn’t grab it. It was 6 inches from the place where I saw it. I got scared and ran to the hospital without worrying about a cough that didn’t even allow me to speak. There, they diagnosed me with atypical pneumonia but I didn’t have phlegm or expectorations, only a lot of coughing. It was all caused by a generalized lupus erythematosus.

After 15 days, I left the hospital with the recommended doses of cortisone and medications for joint pain that were sufficiently strong to control the lupus, but which wouldn’t affect other parts of my body.

That’s how the years passed until December 5, 2015. I entered the hospital because I couldn’t breathe. I was kept in the hospital for tests and they didn’t find anything abnormal. I left on the 12th to return on the 18th with a new crisis in my lungs that was keeping me from breathing. I had pulmonary edema. This time they took a liter of blood from my lungs. I was there until December 26, and they told me that the danger had passed and that I was well.

I returned to the hospital on February 23 with a great deal of fatigue and unable to breathe again. On this occasion I put myself in God’s hands, because I felt it that it was already the end and in fact it I already wanted to die because I was very tired. I had already endured ten years of continual joint pain, constant fatigue, and being overweight by 110 pounds caused by so many steroids and so much cortisone that I was given to control the inflammation in my joints So I was really exhausted.

So I said goodbye to everyone and on just the second day in the hospital, they transferred me to intensive care, first with nasal ports for oxygen, then a mask, and later they intubated me with a feeding tube and fed me this way for eight days. After that, they removed the tube and gave me a tracheotomy. Because I was in this condition, my doctors gave my husband a very discouraging prognosis. They told him that I had no possibility of recovering, and that if I recovered at all, I would have to be in a wheelchair and connected to an oxygen machine because my lungs were not able to regenerate enough because the damage had been so great.

In the process of the tracheotomy, which they did only to keep administering Mab Thera, a medicine recommended by my rheumatologist after the pneumologist said there was nothing else to be done, they let me go. The medicine was supposed to take effect in no later than two days, but five days passed and I only became more critical. The doctors had already given up, when suddenly the pneumologist jumped up and told my husband he didn’t know whose opinion we were respecting, but that we should listen to him because something unexpected was happening. My body began to show very slight signs of improvement, but to him the improvements were enormous.

At that moment, I had left my body and began to return home. I suddenly saw myself as a light, floating in a universe full of colors and forms that opened and closed, and I entered them and went through them full of joy, of happiness, of peace—a joy which there are no words to explain--until I came to another portal, so to speak, in which there was a female figure. She was only a light, but when she spoke, she identified herself as an aunt who had died four months before. And she told me, “Adriana, if you pass through here, you will not be able to return.” I understood that she was giving me a choice. I was still me, Adriana. I was not my body, but I was my essence, and I began to ask myself what there was to return to? Why leave that place where I was so happy, so full, and with such great joy and love in my heart, when I heard my daughter’s voice, telling me, “Mom, I need you for my wedding.” She didn’t have a boyfriend and during the 45 days that I had been in intensive care, she always told me that if I was exhausted, to leave, not to stay for them. But this day was different. She asked me to come back. I understood that we are in this world for love, because only a love of that magnitude could make us leave that peace and the unimaginable joy of that plane.

 

When I made the decision to return, I heard a male voice, telling me, “It is not going to be easy, but the best years of your life were still to come.” And so it was, from that point on, my recovery was wonderful. My alveolus began to function, my tracheotomy tube was removed. They told me I would not be able to talk without covering the hole for three to five days while it healed, and that evening I was talking and taking medication as if I had never had the tracheotomy. And it’s been that way since. Today, I breathe without oxygen, I walk, I travel. Only at altitudes of over 1600 feet above sea level do I need a little extra oxygen. My life is completely normal. I weigh 180 pounds, nothing hurts, and I feel better than ever.

 

From NDERF.org