My history with parapsychology began when I walked into a weekly research meeting at the Rhine Research facility just off the Duke University campus (please see my post about J.B. and Louisa Rhine). A group of mostly retired psychologists was discussing the most recent article in the Journal of Parapsychology as I sat down at the table. I was unemployed and working as a volunteer at the local museum so I was wearing the volunteer T-shirt at the time. I told the group that I was not a researcher, nor was I interested in being one, and that I wanted to write accurately about parapsychology. Thus began my journey into the deep and vast ocean of books, research papers, and websites involved with the subject.
I spent as much time as I could in the Alex Tanous library reading from the hundreds of books it has, I took courses and participated in research studies, but I still wanted to learn more. Of course, I surfed the net and landed on the “New Thinking Allowed” YouTube channel where hundreds of videos on subjects ranging from aliens to meditation can be found. I tried to stick to videos on telepathy, dowsing, remote viewing, and mediumship, but the other titles tantalized me enough to delve further into related subjects.
Jeffrey Mishlove is the current host of the channel and he’s been the public face of parapsychology since his original public television show “Thinking Allowed” began in 1986. He migrated to YouTube with the “New Thinking Allowed” in 2015 where he has posted both taped interviews and live stream events several times a week.
Dr. Mishlove is the only parapsychologist to have received his Ph.D. from an accredited American University migrating from an anomalous psychology interest that had him working with people incarcerated in prison. He wrote two books “The Roots of Consciousness” which was his doctoral dissertation and “The PK Man” about Ted Owens, a talented psychokinetic whom Jeffrey researched. He won the Bigelow Institute essay contest in 2021 with his piece “Beyond the Brain” about survival after bodily death which brings many concepts together into a “bundle of sticks” creating strong evidence for life after death. He is not your run-of-the-mill researcher, rather he is a most knowledgeable and patient interviewer who brings out the most in his guests.
I applied to the New Thinking Allowed foundation to be a volunteer beginning with editing the closed captions on the YouTube channel. Since I suffer from hearing loss and tinnitus, I find accurate subtitling to be important for those in the hearing-impaired community and worked on many videos along with a team of four others. Jeffrey put out a request for editors to work on a book he wants to publish (and hopefully will be) called “Psychic Liberation”, a compilation of a few dozen YouTube transcripts. We worked on this for over two years meeting once every few weeks with Jeffrey to discuss our progress and assignments. I got a chance to look at the first draft of “Beyond the Brain” and found the arguments compelling as did the judges from the Bigelow Institute. I recommend that you go through this multi-media essay for one of the most definitive and thorough arguments for the survival of consciousness that I’ve ever seen.
Amongst his many distinctions, Jeffrey also managed to win a libel case against The Amazing Randi who had made claims in the Journal of Psychology that Jeffrey did not have a degree in parapsychology and that, if he did, he was obviously incompetent. Had he not won that court case, he would not have been inducted into the various scientific associations that have benefitted from his membership.
Although I have great respect for Jeffrey, you will not see a character based on him in my novels (yet). That being said, if you want to watch some really cool, mind-bendingly informative videos about the esoteric, sign up for the weekly newsletter at NewThinkingAllowed.org.
The New Thinking Allowed Foundation has just released its maiden periodical called “New Thinking Allowed” magazine for Spring 2023. You can find it here. For future releases and interviews, join the New Thinking Allowed newsletter.