Parapsychological Experiences

4. President’s Letter
New SPR President, Prof. John Poynton, asks whether the tide has turned for psychical research.
  6. The Medium
Dr Leo Ruickbie talks to Kai Mügge about his life and work as a physical medium, including the question of investigation.
12. The Séance
After the table levitated, what happened next? Dr Leo Ruickbie details his recent experience of a séance with Kai Mügge and the Felix Circle.
16. Listening to Tea Leaves
Ann R. Winsper asks whether electronic voice phenomena are genuine spirit communications or ‘audible tea leaves’.
19. Voices from Pennsylvania
Dr Peter McCue details his analysis of audio files purporting to be communications from the spirits of the deceased.
|22. Auditory Hallucinations
Dr James Paul Pandarakalam poses the question whether the source of auditory hallucinations lies beyond the material brain.
26. The Enfield Saga
Guy Lyon Playfair chronicles the history of the Enfield poltergeist from This House is Haunted to the TV drama The Enfield Haunting.
28. Macfadyen on Enfield
Actor Matthew Macfadyen reveals what it was like to play Guy Lyon Playfair in the recent Sky Living mini-series The Enfield Haunting.
30. The Enfield Effect
SPR Council Member John Fraser considers the increased interest in the SPR and asks what should be done about it.
31. No Coincidence
What happened when the Centre for the Study of Anomalous Psychological Processes went to Crete? Callum Cooper tells all.
33. Ex Libris
SPR Librarian Karen Patel reveals what is new on the library shelves.
34. Ghosts in the Machines
Brandon Hodge searches for the remains of the famous spirit room of Jonathan Koons.
36. Letters
Prof. Peter Mulacz responds to criticisms of his article in PR74.
39. Contributors
40. Events

Although parapsychology traditionally has been concerned with the ques­ tion of whether some aspect of the human being survives bodily death, research on reincarnation, as one form survival might take, is a comparatively recent development. Myers, seemingly unaware of the one important case (Hearn, 1897) that had been published at the time he wrote, concluded in 1903 that “for reincarnation there is at present no valid evidence” (v. 2, p. 134). This situation began to change only in 1960 with the appearance of Ian Stevenson’s paper, “The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarna­ tions,” in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. In the first part of that paper, Stevenson (1960a) reviewed cases of claimed past life memory and reported having found 44 in which the person described as the previous incarnation was traced and identified. In the second part of the paper (Stevenson, 1960b) he considered possible interpretations of the cases and made...

The privileging of physicalist ontologies and rigid experimentalism within parapsychology helps to expose a 'hole' in the praxis of the discipline proper; what psychoanalysis generally refers to as a " lack ". Certain not to fill this hole, using the psychoanalytic approach pioneered by Jacques Lacan (i.e., Lacanian psychoanalysis), the following reading aims to develop theoretically a scene by which parapsychology can come, more self-reflectively, to better take in its scientific practice—the unconscious of its subject, how the discipline has chosen to carve itself out within, what Lacan calls the chaotic, polysemic pool of lalangue, that place where meaning slides around. Indeed, such a return to the unconscious actually opens up the field to more counter-hegemonic phenomena that are typically viewed as fringe. To illustrate this point, I deploy the Lacanian après-coup, otherwise known as retroaction (a causality not from the present time), in conjunction with extrasensory perception research to stage just such an encounter, between the subject of parapsychology and its lack. This not only thwarts the so-called 'source of psi' problem by showing how parapsychology is running from itself, but also reveals a homology between psi and the objet petit a—the little object of desire that must always be tamed. As such, the disciplinary contouring of parapsychological science evokes the wily qualities of the trickster. It follows that, in the future, a further psychoanalysis of parapsychology could work to develop the theoretical insights of this article with some of Lacan's other concepts, such as the jouissance of the body (i.e., the anxious pleasure that animates the subject), and the relationship between drive and desire.

Physics has long been considered the most fundamental and basic of all sciences because it represents human attempts to explain the common reality of our physical existence. No other science deals with our physical reality in either this or any similar manner. However, there are still questions about our existence that fall outside of the scope of physics, so physics cannot be said to offer a complete explanation of our total being. The most important of these questions have been anything to do with death itself.  In the scientific search for objectivity, life has been deemed separate from non-living matter in the discourses and theories of physics, so physicists would have had no reason to explain the death of living beings. Yet recent questions regarding the essential role of consciousness in physics have raised the level of theoretical inquiry to the point that scientists in the physics community can no longer ignore life and death. Furthermore, the recent discovery (or rediscovery) of ‘near death experiences’ (NDEs) has raised serious questions regarding the common reality that we experience, which essentially challenges the physics of consciousness for an explanation. The universality of the experiences is the best evidence for their validation as real events describing a portion of our physical being and this universality has allowed scientists to determine the common properties of the experiences. When accepted as real events, the NDEs imply that our normal conceptions of physical reality are both lacking and inadequate, so it is the duty of those who study physical reality, the physicists, to account for this new extension of our reality.

Shaun Gallagher has actively looked into the possibility that psychopathologies involving “thought insertion” might supply a counterexample to the Cartesian principle according to which one can always recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own. Animated by a general distrust of a priori demonstrations, Gallagher is convinced that pitting clinical cases against philosophical arguments is a worthwhile endeavor. There is no doubt that, if true, a falsification of the immunity to error through misidentification would entail drastic revisions in how we conceive the boundary between self and other. However, I argue that (1) the idea of unearthing an exception to the Cartesian thesis is, on further reflection, not a realistic prospect and that (2) this casts doubt on the attempt to conjoin first-person phenomenology and third-person cognitive science in the service of philosophical debates.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines PSI phenomena (PSIP) as: “the aggregate of parapsychological functions of the mind including extrasensory perception [telepathy, clairvoyance], precognition, and psychokinesis”. Parapsychology (which is considered pseudoscience by the majority of mainstream scientists [including academics], with articles published only in a relatively small number of niche journals) also investigates other paranormal and psychic phenomena like: near-death experiences, reincarnation, apparitional experiences and other paranormal claims. This paper brings in discussion some specific cases of PSI phenomena (which weren’t proved yet to be frauds) with possible explanations and implications in physics, biology and the theories of information and human consciousness. If proved (with no doubt) to be authentic, PSI phenomena may have huge implications in the evolution (and unification) of physics, biology and spirituality (including religious currents): this unification (built on synapse-like bridges of knowledge and informational integration) is the constant purpose of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity.
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International Journal of Parapsychology, 1967.

Reports of people finding themselves "outside" their
physical body have come down to us from the most
ancient recorded history and from a multitude of
different cultures. The typical experience usually contains
some combination of the following elements: (1)
floating; (2) seeing one's physical body from the outside;
(3) thinking of a distant place while "outside"
and suddenly finding oneself there; (4) possessing a
nonphysical body; and (5) being absolutely convinced
that the experience was not a dream. For the vast
majority of people who report this, it was a once-in-a lifetime
experience, and, although it was frequently
reported as pleasurable, they had no idea what caused
it or how to make it re-occur. It was also puzzling to
many of the reporters, as they had never heard of such
experiences and did not know what to make of them.

When Rita Dwyer asked me to present "something" about the future of dreaming in this year's IASD PsiberDreaming conference, I felt very honoured. And I thought: Well, what is this "something"? At that time in June we had some vivid discussion in the IASD psi-dreaming e-group, including the topic of synchronicity. A storm of ideas howled through my mind and I also asked myself: Is there anything new, I can say? Most of the honour goes to those who came before us.

Luke, D (2016). Psychedelics and ESP. Invited lecture for ParaMOOC2016 online parapsychology course.

In 1923, Guillermo Fischer Cárdenas isolated one of the active principles of the haullinogenic jungle decoction ayahuasca, and named it ‘telepathine’ (now called harmine because of its apparently psychical properties. At the beginning of the 20th century there were only two psychedelic substances known to Western intellectuals. By 1950, there were twenty. By the year 2000 there were two-hundred, and the current number known coforms to the prediction that there will be some two-thousand known and tested substances by 2050. At the beginning of the 1950s the psychedelic research era began in earnest, and since this time these substances have been associated with paranormal experiences by the researchers, discovers and inventors who explored them.

This lecture investigates the relationship between psychoactive substances and so-called paranormal phenomena falling within the study of parapsychology. It is primarily concerned with extrasensory perception (ESP)—telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance—as well as out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and near-death experiences (NDEs). The lecture borrows widely, but by no means exhaustively, from parapsychology as well as transpersonal studies, anthropology, ethnobotany, phytochemistry, psychiatry, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology, and neurobiology, particularly neurochemistry. It will cover neurochemical models of paranormal experience, field reports of intentional and spontaneous experiences incorporating anthropological, historical and clinical cases, and personal accounts, surveys of paranormal belief and experience, and experimental research.

Luke, D. (2015). Una introducción a la parapsicofarmacología: Revisión de métodos multimodales para el estudio de psi usando sustancias psicodélicas. In A. Parra (Ed.), Ojos Invisibles; La cruzada por la conquista del espiritu: Una Neurociencia de las Experiencias Paranormales. (pp.213-234). Buenos Aires: Editorial Antigua.

Mind–matter interaction (MMI) is understood in most existing literature relevant to the topic as a subjective experience of physical matter being affected by one’s own mind or the mind of another person in an anomalous manner. Much of the scholarship found on this phenomenon was written from a parapsychological perspective and, as such, has primarily utilised methods of research more or less in line with the natural sciences (i.e. statistical analyses). In studying MMI from a qualitative perspective, instead of more traditional types of psychological experimentation, this article suggests that researchers can better understand the contextual, relational and subjective nature of such phenomena. For this study, several written descriptions were analysed using a descriptive, phenomenological method, with the objective of learning more about some ways that MMI is experienced from a psychological perspective, particularly in relation to issues of personal crisis, the significance of death and/or traumatic encounter. Overall, six descriptions of MMI were analysed, with six constituents of MMI presenting themselves as especially salient. These constituents are: (1) overwhelming emotionality; (2) feeling initial surprise or disbelief; (3) meaning-making centred around the metaphor of physical energy; (4) issues centred around personal control and/or agency; (5) meaning around the event is constructed in primarily communal ways; and (6) accompaniment and openness to other anomalous experiences.

Photographing ‘orbs’ in cemeteries and haunted houses has become extremely popular in the past few years, but no one, to my knowledge, has ever conducted a scientific study of these ‘orbs’. Many people, including both professional ghost hunters and skeptics alike, automatically chalk the ‘orbs’ up to reflected light from various types of material particles (either animate or inanimate) using ‘cheap’ low resolution digital cameras. Yet I myself have photographed ‘orbs’ that defy simple explanation as light reflected from dust, insects, water droplets and so on in a variety of physical situations. So my students and I conducted an experiment to determine the nature of the ‘orbs’ in an upper level philosophy of physics course that I taught. We concluded that nearly all ‘orbs’ are more than likely just photographs of common particulate matter that is out of focus, but science should be
interested in the very few examples of ‘orbs’ that do not fall into this catchall explanatory category.