Guardians of the Afterworld by Dr. Stafford Betty, released January 2024, and Nosso Lar: Life in the Spirit World as dictated by the spirit Andres Luiz to Francisco Candido Xavier, released in 1944 and translated into English, are both books about life beyond bodily death. The former is a work of fiction that compiles years of Dr. Betty’s study of what one aspect of the afterlife may be like based on religious texts and scientific survival studies. The latter is written like a biography, if you will, of a physician who had crossed over to a plane of existence called Nosso Lar.
Guardians follows two fictional characters, Numen and Sephia. The first chapter deals with the development of the guardians from two planets in the Milky Way that are very different from Earth. With their mentor, Fruva, they adapt to their new human spirit forms and positions as guardians of the astral realm just above our own, populated with discarnates. The remainder of the book follows them through the difficulties of running this astral level.
Nosso Lar follows Andres Luiz as he navigates the spiritual bureaucracy that apparently exists in the discarnate realm, which helps those in the Umbral region (think Purgatory) overcome the individual issues that keep them from spiritual growth and advancement. He must also shed the earthly attitudes of core family identities to include all people as sisters and brothers.
In Guardians, the victims of the war between Ukraine and Russia continue their conflict in the astral plane, causing Numan and Sephia to address them all.
In Nosso Lar, since this was written on the advent of World War II, the governor must address those who are concerned about loved ones still on Earth and quell the fear and anxiety of the newer members as war looms in Europe.
If either of these accounts is true, we may expect a similar existence as our kind of hierarchical structure on Earth. However, we will have spiritual capabilities and a greater awareness of the different astral levels or spheres that lead to higher and higher levels of growth and abilities. To ascend to these higher spheres, one is expected to work toward one or many goals, assist others toward advancing into the astral from the Umbral, and find forgiveness and love toward each other. Almost every religious Earthly text states those goals as a necessary requirement for heavenly entrance, so it shouldn’t be surprising.
In Guardians, Numen is curious about the lower realm, where people dwell in fear of the astral plane, thinking that they must exist as they did when they lived on Earth. They continue to slink along dirty streets, imbibing on the sins and addictions they had grown so accustomed to…still living in the flesh instead of the spirit. He meets Pol Pot, once a dictator on Earth, who could not relieve himself of the belief that those he had killed were a necessary sacrifice for the welfare of the state. He followed a path that led nowhere and could not be convinced that it was futile. Numen and Sephia would meet astral dwellers who would frequent these lower planes, trying to convince these discarnates that they were living in a hell they created for themselves.
Andres Luiz, as a physician on Earth, wanted to continue his work in Nosso Lar. When he was allowed to work with “patients” in the spiritual realm, he found that his earthly focus on the physical body left him ignorant about the conditions he would see at this particular hospital. These people in transition from the lower realm were to be spiritually rehabilitated to advance into Nosso Lar or be sent back to the lower realm.
What is striking about both accounts is that every human (and alien) soul has free will to follow the path of spiritual awareness and advancement or fall further into the clutches of a corporeal focus. Many of those atheists or agnostics I speak with say that they can’t believe there is a god who would allow human suffering. But human suffering is a composition of human choice, not the will of God or whatever primary consciousness that runs things. If the autocrats of the world simply chose to uplift the people of their countries rather than think their path is the only, best route, perhaps there would not be war in Ukraine or Gaza right now. If large corporations put more emphasis on people rather than profit, perhaps we wouldn’t be humans suffering from income disparity, climate change, and radicalism. The goal of life on Earth is to find the path toward spiritual enlightenment, fraternity, and forgiveness, recognizing that we are all connected and that none of us knows the path the other must follow in this existence. It is not like these are the only two texts that emphasize this…there are thousands. It is not as if the spiritual realm doesn’t try its level best to send us clues….we’re simply ignoring them.
NOTE: Dr. Stafford Betty will be interviewed on Friday, June 14th at 7 PM EST via Zoom. Please go to Rhine.org for more information.
All of us, in the United States at least, have been taught that life began in the oceans, starting from single-celled organisms and ending with more complex organisms living in an ecosystem. When the oceans receded to icebergs at the poles, creating more landmass, organisms began to crawl out of the water onto land. Plants, animals, and insects became more complex and specialized to adapt to their environments and social structures. However, one genus of organism decided to head back to the ocean.
This knowledge came to me quite recently through the television show NOVA: When Whales Could Walk. It was not a popular idea when first hypothesized so much evidence had to be collected. There appears to be a fossil record in South America where the land-based whale skeleton had legs. Other fossil records elsewhere showed a mammal that spent more and more time in the water. The cousin of that creature is the hippopotamus and they have many physical simularities such as webbed hooves. The other evidence was from a dead pilot whale that had washed up on shore, a rare event. A whale expert worked with an evolutionary biologist to perform an autopsy on the small, unfortunate creature. What they found defied what would be expected of a sea-based organism. Some of you may be aware of the unique type of multi-chambered stomach that ungulates (cows) have because they must digest the part of the plant that humans call “fiber”. This pilot whale had that type of stomach, though it is not an herbivore. Another clue was a small bone near what would have been the whale’s hip but unattached to the skeleton, what the scientists said was a leg bone. There is also how whales and dolphins swim: they use their flukes in an up-and-down motion, mimicking walking rather than the side-to-side motion of fish.
As fascinating as this is, what does it have to do with ESP? Simple: we can find clues in the human and animal record about it. We have a fossil and a written record of our development from the common ape ancestor to where we are now. We can compare ourselves to the mammals closest to us (apes) and other animals we consider intelligent (e.g. whales, dolphins, elephants). We can discuss the animal communication questions with scientists and with tested animal communicators (the psychic ones, not the behaviorists). Animals use many forms of communication such as chemical scent and vocalizations. Woodpeckers will find a high-tension tower and use rapid pecking to communicate with other woodpeckers. Dogs pee on anything and everything to leave a message for other dogs. Birds, especially those living in very thick vegetation, have brightly colored plumage to communicate health and vitality to their females. Squirrels will climb into the trees and send out a warning to other squirrels that a predator is on the loose.
However, no animal has the capacity for very specific meaning in their communication except for humans. We speak and write our information to one another using complex social, sentence structure, and vocabulary conveying nuanced meaning depending on inflexion. Then we developed methods for communicating across distances first with the written language, then through telegraph and telephone, now through Zoom and social media which is almost instantaneous though it may come from the other side of the globe. The potential need for telepathic communication may have gone the way of smoke signals because there was a better, more specific and easier way to communicate.
I may be what is called a panpsychist which is a person that believes all of nature has some level of awareness or consciousness. I specifically think that all of creation has access to a field, force or some other natural aspect that I like to call the information field. Animals may communicate with one another using animal telepathy and it doesn’t require knowledge of the other’s specific language. There really is a dearth of scientific inquiry regarding animal psi but there is one scientist who has looked into it and who has proposed experiments to strengthen the claim. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist from Cambridge University who has a theory called Morphic Resonance which I recommend you read about, or watch the videos on the website. He looked into dogs who know when their owners are coming home, and N’Kisi, an African Grey parrot who seemed to know what her human companion was thinking and could use human language to describe it. You may own a pet and they may be eerily able to read your mind.
We can also go to archeologists and anthropologists for the question about psychic ability amongst people who live without technology or who embrace the older or ancestral systems. A book called Anthropology and Psychic Research goes into some of these written accounts and a current anthropologist named Jack Hunter goes into the cultural, ritual processes involved with unexplained phenomena.
The last step is to test ourselves. What parapsychologists already know is that telepathy and clairvoyance are both quite subliminal, not in our faces, just a quiet voice. Our world has become attention-grabbing in so many ways, it’s hard just to hear someone speaking to us much less pick up on ESP. It has become so pervasive that parapsychologists use a technique called ganzfeld to remove exposure to outside stimuli. If you take time to quiet your mind through meditation and want to have these types of communications, you can see for yourself if ESP is part of human communication.
In my second book “Calliope O’Callahan and the Dowsers”, Callie befriends a Brazilian healer by the name of Isabelle. Brazil has a long and tolerant respect for psi-related abilities with at least two parapsychology facilities studying the phenomena. What Isabelle practices is a form of healing called Reiki.
This is what the Google AI chatbot found:
What is Reiki and how is it done?
It’s a gentle, non-invasive energy healing practice that promotes deep relaxation and inner peace based on the belief that there is a universal life force energy that flows through all living things and can be harnessed to promote healing and well-being.
The philosophy of Reiki is rooted in the belief that we are all connected to a source of universal energy, which is often referred to as “Ki” or “Chi.” This energy is vital for our physical, mental, and emotional well-being, and when it is flowing freely, we are healthy and balanced. However, when our energy is blocked or disrupted, we can experience pain, illness, and emotional distress. This is often stated as having a blocked Chakra point in the body.
Reiki practitioners believe that they can use their hands to channel this universal energy to help heal others. By placing their hands on or near the recipient’s body, they can help promote relaxation, balance the energy flow, and support the body’s natural healing processes.
It is typically administered in a series of sessions, each lasting for around 60 to 90 minutes. During a session, the recipient lies fully clothed on a massage table or sits comfortably in a chair. The practitioner places their hands on or near the recipient’s body and uses gentle touch to help promote relaxation and energy flow.
Although psi-related healing practices are accepted in other parts of the world, especially in South America, the issue is how Reiki may be adopted into the current medical practices and hospitals in the United States. Since medicine in the U.S. is arguably a for-profit model, with the insurance companies paying the practitioners, and it is highly regulated requiring medical personnel to be educated and certified, Reiki is not easily accepted.
The Rhine research meeting had a Reiki practitioner discussing how the Cancer Center at Duke is integrating other forms of healing (acupressure, acupuncture, meditation) into its program for a more “integrated” healing experience. Before the Enlightenment, spiritual and natural healing practices were the norm, but scientific materialists removed those instead of scientifically sound medical practices. But humans are not machines and medical knowledge encompasses about 30% of what is going on in the human body, an integrated system.
What is frustrating for physicians and pharmaceutical companies is the human’s ability to spontaneously heal from a disease state, or to use natural functions to reverse a chronic condition. We do not understand the process because there is little money to be made in either of these situations so little money goes into researching them.
One of the arguments made during the research meeting is that non-medical healing techniques shouldn’t be part of the overall medical establishment and that it was never intended to be partnered with the for-profit medical model. I’m of two minds about this. On the side of keeping Reiki in the hands of the Reiki practitioners, I agree that if you have healing hands, give freely of your skill to those in need. On the side of regulating non-medical healing practices, some people are egregiously taking money from the desperate and those who are self-deluded into thinking they’re healers and advertise erroneously. The work that the Forever Family Foundation is doing might serve as a template for Reiki and other styles of non-medical healing techniques. They test the mediums that work with the bereaved friends and family of those who have passed on to make sure they are the genuine articles. It need not be as strenuous a certification as a medical practitioner requires, but at least provide a level of trust that is otherwise currently lacking.
Note: This blog post does not recommend that you forego medical treatment by a licensed medical provider.
Lorna Byrne is an Irish author who has written “Angels Among Us,” which was published in 2008, became a New York Times bestseller, and was translated into more than 30 languages. Byrne’s other books include “The Light Within You,” “Angels in My Hair,” and “A Message of Hope from the Angels.”
Byrne was born in Ireland in 1953 to a financially struggling family. She claimed to see angels as a baby and grew up thinking that everyone could. However, Byrne is profoundly dyslexic and was unable to complete any formal education past primary school. It is through a miracle of technology along with the assistance of others that she could have four books published about her life with the angels. Her books have been such a success that she has appeared on numerous television shows and radio programs, and given lectures and workshops around the world traveling six to nine months of the year.
On Sunday, January 21, Byrne held a livestream event on YouTube discussing her experiences with Jeffrey Mishlove and Emmy Vadnais with questions from viewers. She talked about how angels have helped her in her life, and she shared her insights on how we can all connect with them. Of course, the inevitable questions about her sanity and veridicity were asked. As for her sanity, she was evaluated before a major surgery and found to be as sane as the rest of us. In her books, she offers numerous examples of precognition and clairvoyance that are given to her by her guides and she has offered to be tested by parapsychologists who are curious about them.
After reviewing the literature, I have concluded that we are not alone in the universe and that our neighbors find it difficult to communicate with us on this plane. Although I posted a question “Have the angels you’ve seen ever said or hinted that they may be another type of entity?” there was no time for her to answer it. However, Byrne does say that all other cultures and religions have their types of angels and call them by their cultural names. She does not state that the angels are only there for Catholic believers. That being said, her visitors have identified themselves by name, and they are a part of the angelic pantheon from the Christian Bible.
Reading Byrne’s books and listening to her interviews, you can see the rules by which the angels work. They do not interfere with human free will. The guardians assist their charges, healing angels help the ill, and “unemployed” angels do whatever task is requested, but only when specifically asked. One might venture that prayer is the request that galvanizes angelic assistance. When asked if humans become angels, Byrne states that angels serve humans and love us unconditionally. We are destined to be and are greater than these beings.
Putting together Byrne’s angels with that of spiritual medium contacts and close encounters of the fourth kind experiencers, there may be a plethora of entities willing to wear any facade that helps us feel comfortable with them. One need only read the rich historical myths as examples of how the “gods” appeared to humans to see how entities may have always been among us.
My travels as an editor have led me to this book from the latest book to be released by White Crow Books in the series from New Thinking Allowed. Since the New York Times release of Naval video footage and a story by Leslie Kean, the discussion around UFOs (or UAPs now) has gone from fringe woo-woo to “Hey, there must be something to this after all.” As a result, the book I’m editing has come from transcripts by people Dr. Mishlove has interviewed over the years who know about “alien encounters”. Only one has to do with the physical close encounters of the name-your-number. The rest are about the experiences of the victims or, as we say in parapsychology “the experiencers”.
I am not a believer in the “alien visitor” hypothesis considering that we have so little data about the origins of these phenomena but I do think something is going on, and has since we branched off from our ape ancestors to begin the genus “Homo”. If I’m starting to sound like the ancient astronaut theorists from the History Channel, please continue reading so I may disavow this idea and explain further what I mean.
One of the interviewees brought up this book called The Nine during their discussion with Dr. Mishlove and I thought it would be worth checking into. This is the book blurb:
Stuart Holroyd, skeptical, open-minded, and well-informed, became
Observer to a remarkable U.S. group of psychics headed by a famous American scientist and an English aristocrat. They claimed that they had made contact with galactic intelligences and their “evidence” was astounding…
– Did three “selected” minds help to avert world disaster?
-Was the group in constant communication with extraterrestrials?
-Was it possible for these alien intelligences to effect a landing on Earth?
-Had they, in fact, already visited Earth in previous centuries?
-Did the group’s meditations avert Kissinger’s assassination and a Middle East holocaust?
from the book’s back cover
This is a pretty good summary of what I read. You’re probably wondering why Henry Kissinger is involved. This book was written in 1977 after the Middle East was having fits about Israel. Yes, I read this book just before Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023 taking prisoners, killing Jews and anyone else they came across which included Americans. The synchronicity is not lost on me.
The writer, Stuart Holroyd, is a British author famous for being one of the original “Angry Young Men” in the 1950s before it gained popularity in the 1960s. He went from being angry to looking into the paranormal and esoteric. The American scientist was Andrija Puharich who had over fifty patents, primarily medical, one of which involved hearing aids. He studied several very powerful mediums, healers, and Uri Geller, the Israeli famous for spoon-bending and other psychokinetic feats. The aristocrat was Sir John Whitmore, a racecar driver who had a near-death experience, which caused him to sell his pile in England and use his fortune to bankroll Puharich’s work for a while. The third was a trance medium named Phyllis Schlemmer, the Transceiver of the Nine. Several other people were tangentially involved with the project including a young man named Bobby who was to be an important addition to the group but opted not to stay.
Andrija Puharic and Uri Geller (1972)Phyllis Schlemmer Sir John Whitmore
The Council of Nine, as they called themselves, spoke through Phyllis while Whitmore and Puharich listened, sometimes using a tape recorder to capture what the Nine said. The author treats these events in chronological order and determines, from the many interactions the three principles had with The Nine, those communications he deemed were coherent and important. Interspersed throughout are reality checks. Holroyd pulls the reader through the fourth wall to say, “Hey, yeah, this reads like fiction, but I promise you, this stuff happened.” And, “Yeah, I bet you’re thinking ‘pull the other one’ right now, but if you look at it, it could just be nine super powerful dudes talking to these three humans.”
Puharich took these communications in stride since this wasn’t his first rodeo. He had worked with a transceiver and a healer and had received similar messages. However, the three principles frequently squabbled and their egos interfered with the plan on occasion. It is fun to read The Nine rebuking three accomplished adults over their issues with one another, but that’s where the fun ends and the explosions go off in your mind as you continue to read. Taking what The Nine say at face value as the author recommends, a series of messages peeking into their reality unfolds that would make Philip K. Dick freak. Like the President of the United States has several members of the White House Press Corp, The Nine used several spokes-entities as liaisons to speak through Phyllis, primarily one named Tom.
The primary reason The Nine were in contact with the three was to avert a devastating possible World War III with Israel as the center of the conflict. Whitmore, Puharic, and Schlemmer together apparently made a perfect “human” to work through and with to achieve these goals. Bobby would have been a better transceiver but, according to Tom, he forgot what he came here to do. When asked why they didn’t force him, manipulate him, or use other tactics to convince him of the importance of his task, they replied that we humans have free will and The Nine cannot interfere, even if humans made the choice before coming to this planet. The message here is that we come to this life on planet Earth with a plan for our lives, but our memories get wiped and we may not achieve our goals. We also have free will to do with our lives as we want. It’s not all candy on Halloween though. If we don’t achieve our goals here, we get to go through remedial school when we leave our lives here and before we can progress to higher planes.
Other messages and information include:
“…more advanced technologies would help ensure the survival of the planet”
Bioengineering. Both Phyllis and Bobby were re-engineered to be better transceivers.
“…dark forces that try to prevent all this happening, and one of their ways is to insinuate false teachings in the communications. It is not so difficult for them for they are sly and under the guise of something fine, they can be misleading.”
They had different forms as if they were from different planets
Many different types of craft would land over nine days leaving teachers behind to help Earth evolve (this is a future event).
“To raise the vibration of the souls, to bring them out of darkness – and when we say darkness, we do not mean negativity but true darkness – for they do not see and do not understand the cosmic, and they also do not understand that when they hate and when they are angry, this creates a problem for the universe. Only by raising the level of the consciousness of this planet, and perfecting the love and the core that is inside each human being, can we go on then to perfect other planets in the galaxies. This planet is one of the lowest that the soul comes to learn a lesson. The tragedy of this planet is its density. It is like a mire; it is sticky, and these beings get trapped in this stickiness…we are going to raise the level of this planet, make it a lighter planet. The energy then coming from it will be sent into the universe and will help raise the levels of consciousness and the levels of other planets…”
“…this planet has lagged behind, it hasn’t progressed like it’s supposed to…beneath this planet…are other beings, other civilizations, that there are other people with more technology that can help raise it, but this planet is so bogged down in pure ego, and without harmony and out of balance, that it’s upsetting the master plan.”
The Nine are equivalent to the top cosmic governing council
There is no other planet like Earth and every being that exists in the Universe must take a turn here. If this planet fails, then all the souls that haven’t had a turn here will not obtain the necessary growth.
UFOs come from many places, including the place The Nine inhabit, but many are not physical, just appear to be.
“…[The Nine] are not God. All of you and all of us make God…Many of your physical beings deify other physical beings, when it is truly them.”
“Many souls when they die are trapped in the atmosphere and are evolved over and over on this planet, and seem to be going nowhere. This planet was originally created to teach a being balance between the spiritual and the physical world, and so these beings never evolve beyond the belt of this planet. Their desires hold them to this planet.”
The emissary, Tom said, “The difficulty we have in understanding the problems you have in this gross heavy density world that as physical beings you must exist upon…”
Dr. Puharich had worked with another transceiver prior to Phyllis named D.G. Vinod who had achieved contact with The Nine. He had also worked with, and wrote a book about, Uri Geller who, Puharich claimed, had abilities given to him from superhuman entities which he said were The Nine.
This can be taken at face value and be applied to the unknown experiences that humans have had even before the Roswell event’s flying saucers. This could also be a misinformation campaign if you are to believe those who think that Puharic was using mind control to test CIA tactics. Those people skeptical of Puharic tend to have a Christian philosophy and are against The Nine because they have been quoted as saying that Christianity is based on a false premise. Tom called Jesus of Nazareth the “Nazarene” and claimed he was simply human but given many superhuman abilities to guide humanity forward. Instead, we deified Jesus and created another religion. I guess you can see why Christians would be miffed and would want to debunk The Nine.
There is the issue of veridical data. None of the tapes that Puharic made exist and much of the experimental data has not been shared by the Stanford Research Institute researchers who looked at Uri Geller’s ability. Over and over in this book and the book “Uri”, Puharic claims that the tapes were wiped and the documentation disappeared. One has to wonder why that happened or even if it did. Why was a book about The Nine written but no proof provided? Is this another trick like the Scientology philosophy? Was it a CIA brainwashing program? Why were so many influential people involved? Why is The Nine still so pervasive today, especially amongst the wealthy and powerful? And, what happened to Puharic when he returned to the U.S.?
You would think that finally getting a book edited, re-written, re-edited, designed, and uploaded for epub platforms would feel like “Well done, mate,” but it’s just the beginning.
I still remember vividly walking into the Rhine during the Wednesday weekly research meeting and being met with cordial greetings. I was so excited to get started on my psychometry thriller. The very first chapter was already written:
A woman is working late in an office. She rubs her palms nervously along her skirt as she waits for the jump drive to finish uploading a file. The room is dark, with just a few lights on here or there making every corner a possible hiding place for something sinister. As the progress bar reaches one hundred percent, she grasps the jump drive and quickly shuts down the computer she isn’t supposed to have access to. The drive goes into a zippered pouch in her purse as she gets up to leave, feeling a bit less nervous. She wasn’t noticed, it’ll be fine. Echoes of her heels clicking on the polished wooden floors sound like little gunshots. She stops to remove her shoes and continues to the elevator in bare feet. If only she could stop the sound from her rapid heartbeats which seemed, to her, a dead giveaway to her position. She presses the down button, then, again and again, it is taking too long. Was that movement over there? The air conditioner whooshes to life and she jumps at the sound before recognizing it’s benign. The interminable elevator dings its arrival slowly opening its doors in mockery of her desire to be gone. She glances into the car for any other travelers, then enters pushing the lobby button several times to make sure the elevator is aware of her impatience.
The doors open upon a darkened corridor, wide with shuttered shops and cafes along either side. She glances first down one side and then the other, listening for any movement, footfall, or breath. Satisfied that she is alone, the woman heads to the exit down the corridor to the right. Her walk is more brisk than usual and she fails to mask the sound of her movements. Just this right turn and then the door out of here, she thinks, breaking into a quicker gait. She rounds the corner, in sight of the glass exit doors, when a hand grasps her purse, forcing her to twirl in place. All she sees is a flash of metal, and then wetness oozes down her front. The assailant pulls the purse from her grasp and leaves her to hold her throat together with both her hands as she tries to bring air into her blood-filled trachea. She collapses to the floor. The last thing her ears perceive is the rapidly receding click, click of the murderer’s shoes, and the bang of the exit door. The last thing she sees as her vision tunnels is her outstretched arm with the charm bracelet that means so much to her.
“Not again!” Violette said, who was grasping the charm bracelet in her left hand.
That was a pretty good first chapter in my humble opinion, but now I had to learn more about psychometry and how psychics and law enforcement worked together to solve crimes. It wasn’t long after that Sally Rhine Feather said “Elizabeth, once you finish that novel, could you work on one for young people?” And Calliope O’Callahan was born. However, after every meeting I attended, every book and research paper I read, and every talk I listened to, I realized how deeply rich the world of parapsychology is. Like a kid in a candy store, I wanted Callie to have all the abilities known to science, but that isn’t realistic. I was also more interested in the experiences and the effects than in the characters I created. My first completed draft went to a content editor. She looked at the story and found the characters flat and the middle to be quite boring. After I pulled myself off the floor, I learned more about the craft of writing, especially what makes a character’s journey compelling. The next three years were spent on this journey until I felt I had a draft worth sending out to a few interested readers. Their notes were encouraging so off to the second editor it went.
The next fun part was publishing. I listened to numerous authors and other members of the publishing world compare and contrast self-publishing with traditional publishing. The last few years with Amazon as King Kong has thrown traditional publishing into a tizzy. I won’t bore you with details, but it’s why I went the self-publishing route. Self-publishing is like opening your own business, so I have to absorb the costs and responsibilities of my copyright (book). I am fortunate to have a freshly graduated mass media major helping me with social media, but I enjoy teaching, so I’ll be going to events when that is possible, and I will add those to my website.
After this six-year trek, I’m a published author, member of several parapsychology organizations, copy-editor for New Thinking Allowed publications and for the Journal of Parapsychology and newly minted member of the board for the Rhine. With these bona fides, I attended a local fan convention called ConGregate 9 in Winston-Salem to speak about parapsychology. Fans love paranormal subjects but have little if any awareness of what parapsychologists study, or that any of these experiences are real. It wasn’t attended by a large number of people, and as an unknown, I didn’t get top billing for my panels, but a con runner needs to think about what the fans want and I needed to keep my mind on the primary goal: get the subject of parapsychology out to a new group of people. It went well, and there was awe, support, curiosity, and vindication, which was very cool. I hope you can attend one of these fan conventions one day, or perhaps a library talk is more your speed, either way, it would be great to meet you to discuss more about your journey into parapsychology.
I have been listening to the Yale philosopher Christopher Noёl on the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel and have had my mind blown away. With all the years of research I’ve been doing, I had pretty much ignored where our souls/spirit selves go when leaving this mortal realm. It’s kinda over there in the corner somewhere and then in another dimension, perhaps. Or, it’s a pocket universe that makes it hard for people of that realm to communicate with us, or we’re simply downloaded into an information field.
Rather, I have become more excited about the latest Journal of Parapsychology paper about how parapsychologists could create an overarching theory of psi as those early biologists did the theory of evolution (“Toward a “Parapsychological Synthesis”: Proposals for Integrating Theories of Psi” by Michael Nahm). It goes into detail about the sundry and various hypotheses that were finally wrangled into a cohesive and coherent theory that could be accepted by science at large. When parapsychology as a science does this with the theory of psi, it will be one step closer to an accepted scientific endeavor. What Christopher Noël says about dark matter might be another option.
When I saw Christopher Noël’s interview on his most current book There Is No Veil: At Play in the Vast Here and Now, I was intrigued. He is a philosopher, which means he looks at life from unusual perspectives, pushing us out of the boundaries of our current modes of thought. I am an autodidact philosopher and can respect that trait in others even if it can be frustrating for the paradigm-thinkers. He begins with a story almost typical in American teenage society pre-social media: with an Ouija board. I cringe inwardly at this because it isn’t a particularly safe tool to use. It’s akin to leaving the front door of your house wide open after having sent invitations to strangers to come on in. Of course, that’s what happened to young Christopher and his companions, a low spirit who felt too guilty to move on to the next realm came into the house for a little tête-a-tête. They were lucky that this weighty soul had no ill intent toward them, he simply needed them to get married and have a girl child to replace the daughter he’d killed. You can’t make this stuff up guys. Of course, Christopher didn’t marry his friend and have the child, which frustrated the dead guy no end, but it did open up a mental door in Christopher’s mind. He, like I, did not have a cultural impediment preventing him from contemplating what this visitation meant.
Later, he read Vera Rubin’s hypothesis about why galaxies behave as they do, that the speed of the outer solar systems within those galaxies was the same as those closer to the galactic center. This shouldn’t happen unless there is invisible matter using gravity to move them along to the tune of ten times more invisible matter than visible. What did this mean to Christopher Noël? That we’re swimming in dark matter, it’s all around us and more pervasive than the matter we can perceive. Imagine going down to the bottom of a deep ocean trench with movie director/producer James Cameron and you photograph a fish. That fish has spent its entire life miles below the surface in pitch-dark, cold, high-pressure seawater. That fish never goes to the surface and only knows this environment. To us, it appears to be the harshest and loneliest place on earth, but this creature knows no different. Not to mention, this fish does not perceive James Cameron in his high-tech bathysphere as he tries to get its attention for a photo op.
Christopher takes a leap of logic and hypothesizes that this dark matter may be the stuff of our next life evolution. Let me take you along the trajectory of that leap so you might understand better what he’s thinking. Dark matter and dark energy are not visible to us nor to our measuring devices. We can only see their effects on the matter in the universe. This is akin to circumstances before the invention of the microscope where instead of bacteria, viruses, and fungi causing disease, something called “bad humors” was the culprit and leeches were the cure. We can frequently see effects before we understand the cause in science which pushes us to make better devices for perception and measurement. Now, through the use of microscopes, we know that it’s single-celled organisms causing us so much trouble.
Why is dark matter currently impossible to perceive even with our advanced telescopes and spectrophotometers? It may be that it exists at a different frequency than our visible matter does. It may be less dense with its atoms having more space between nucleus and electrons. Perhaps the only perception device able to handle the presence of dark matter is the human brain. Every once in a while, something made of dark matter may be able to consciously lower its frequency to our level of visible matter and voila: ghost.
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, a number of physical mediums were given credit for creating a mysterious substance that was later called ectoplasm. Noises, shapes, the sudden appearance of objects (apports), movements, all of these things were attributed to the medium. Perhaps the truth is that the spirits could condense their atoms, attune their frequencies to match our own, and create matter from what appeared to be thin air. They could manipulate our matter from their realm to make things happen for us to perceive. It may explain, Christopher states, why it tends to feel cold around ghost events because of the rapid deflation necessary for the ghost to manipulate our environment (e.g. dry ice or liquid nitrogen) or apported items feel hot to the touch when they first appear (rapid increase in density).
I had the pleasure to listen to Laura Lynn Jackson who has a cameo appearance in my first book (under a different name). She is one seriously talented psychic medium who has the infectious joy of a saint. When asked where the other side might be, she said, “It’s right here” pointing directly in front of her. She told us that our spirit guides and soul family are present all around us all the time. They are trying to make contact with us but it’s difficult because we’re not paying attention. She said that they find it easier to manipulate things that have energy flowing through them or are affected by electromagnetism. They may cause lights to flicker or they may change the T.V. channel while you’re watching a show. All of those little glitches we tend to put down to mechanical failure. It sure does sound like something an entity from a higher frequency realm might do to get our attention.
Christopher mentions that Fredrick Meyers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research (1882), visited famous medium Geraldine Cummins thirty years after his death. He described his new home to her:
It is a structure so fine, it is invisible to the mortal eye and the finest instruments of the scientists. Ether is a bad term, but I cannot find another word to define it. This is a kind of air or as I would like to say, a fluid or an emanation. It is the ancestor of matter as we know it.
Noël states further that the etheric body that inhabits our physical body may be why we have evidence of out-of-body and near-death experiences. The etheric body just goes on a walkabout and then reinhabits the corporeal body once more. It could also be why psychokinesis works. People may have the ability to manipulate the dark matter/visible matter ratio within an object to make it move the way they want (e.g. table levitation). Or spirit knocks which are measurably different from rapping on an object with a knuckle or tool. They have a noise spike like pressure has built up in an object and then is suddenly released.
This is where my mind went blewy. I’ve been spending time considering that our matter was being controlled by a complex set of software, that or we’re living in a holographic universe as avatars. His hypothesis never even computed before, but makes so much sense. Not only that, but it means that with the advent of better measuring and perception devices, we humans might be able to bridge the gap between our perceived universe and that of the spirits.
I attended a Rhine science meeting where the scientists were debating the study that Rupert Sheldrake did with a remarkable African Grey parrot named N’kisi. I read this study years ago because my husband and I had an African Grey parrot named Nicodemus for thirty years. There are several AGs in captivity that have developed a really good vocabulary and have been tested using their acquired ability to tell us about their intelligence. However, in this instance, Dr. Sheldrake is testing N’kisi’s psychic ability.
It was 2003 when N’kisi’s human “Aimée Morgana noticed that her language-using African Grey parrot, N’kisi, often responded to her thoughts and intentions in a seemingly telepathic manner.” She had heard of Dr. Sheldrake’s previous work regarding dogs that knew when their humans were coming home and decided to get in touch. For the experiment, they put N’kisi into another room where the parrot would be unable to have any input from Aimée at all. N’kisi may or may not have been told what was going on, but that wasn’t in the paper. So, the parrot spent time just vocalizing and saying random words which is what happy parrots do. Aimée was asked to take photos out of envelopes and look at them for a period of two minutes each for a total of 149 trials. The researchers working with Dr. Sheldrake and Aimée decided on a set of keywords based on N’kisi’s vocabulary that matched the pictures Aimée looked at.
They used a videotape of the parrot and had three different people interpret what N’kisi said while they were conducting the experiment. Aimée wrote down when the two-minute window occurred so they could narrow down the time frame on the videotape.
Parrots can be notoriously difficult to understand for people who aren’t their humans very much like two-year-old kids are, so the interpreters may not have been able to understand N’kisi very well. This narrowed down the trials from 149 to 71 where the parrot uttered the keywords clearly. In twenty-three of those, N’kisi said one or two keywords associated with the pictures Aimée was looking at at the time.
Now it’s time to look at N’kisi’s results based on a possible set of random answers. If N’kisi was just to say words at random while Aimée was looking at pictures, the parrot should have only got about 12 by accident. Statistically, it’s significant that the parrot got almost twice that. Where skeptics frequently have a problem is this interpretation of the statistics so this study wasn’t well received.
However, based on the stories told by average people everywhere, whether or not their animals can speak human, is that they appear to know more than they should. Now, we know that dogs have a really good sense of smell, and that’s arguably why they can sense the changes in their human’s smell that might mean a diabetic event or seizure, but how do they know it’s going to be a medical emergency? If I were a dog, I would notice my human’s scent is different and then go back to my nap rather than dial 911 with my paw.
Look up “animal communicators”, “pet psychics”, or “animal intuitive” and you’ll find quite a few people specialize in psychic bonds with creatures. Try to look up studies done with animal communicators and you’ll be pretty disappointed. I was able to find some researchers who studied animal psi, but not much about human/animal psychic links. Once, years ago, I stumbled upon a poorly designed horse communicator experiment where the horses had a medical problem and “told” the psychic who then had that confirmed by a veterinarian. I think there was also one done with a dog whisperer who could diagnose pets before their veterinarian visit. But look at the number of happy customers these intuitives have. Something about the human/animal relationship changes when an intuitive becomes their counselor. I don’t have the data on how many of these meetings fail compared to the successes so I cannot speak to anything beyond the anecdotal.
What’s important here is that we need to expand past our anthropocentric views of the world. Animals appear to be much more than the sum of their chromosomes and the instincts that scientists claim drive them. We need to take seriously that there is something far more basic than speech involved in communication, so basic that animals can grasp it and are able to communicate across species.
Curious people become scientists. Some people find their original path of inquiry will make a giant curve toward an unexpected journey simply because they had one experience. Dr. Julie Beischel had intended to become one of a plethora of biochemists looking at potential new drugs but an incident with a spiritual medium derailed that idea. She and her husband now run the Windbridge Institute in California where they study mediums’ abilities.
J.B. Rhine and his wife Louisa were botanists having both received their degrees at the University of Chicago when they attended a lecture by the author Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only did Doyle write the wildly popular stories about Sherlock Holmes, but he was also an avid believer in the afterlife and the abilities of spiritual mediums to have access to those who had passed on. At that time, in 1922, the Society for Psychical Research studied spiritual and physical mediums, but not using lab-oriented, blinded, and reproducible experimentation. Botanists of the early twentieth century utilized the most robust statistical methods of the time and Rhines decided to apply these to study supernatural abilities.
Since the SPR was a relatively new organization and focused mainly in the United Kingdom, it was difficult for J.B. Rhine to find an academic position studying anomalous abilities in the United States. He continued to teach botany and Louisa to teach Latin until, when they had nearly given up hope, J.B. found a home in the newly formed Psychology department at Duke University with like-minded chairman William McDougall — a past president of both the American and British SPR. By 1935, Rhine presided over the Parapsychology Laboratory and worked tirelessly to create rigorous experiments to show the statistical existence of extrasensory perception, a term he made famous in his book “Extrasensory Perception” published in 1934.
Along with developing experiments with her husband, Louisa Rhine became the unofficial curator of the numerous letters sent to the Rhine after J.B.’s bestseller gave those who had experienced anomalous events hope that they were not alone. She published several books about the anecdotal events explained in the thousands of correspondence they received. By 1980, Louisa became president of the SPR, the same year J.B. passed away.
The Rhine Research Center is the oldest parapsychology laboratory in the United States and the Rhines’ methodologies and experiments have been utilized and replicated in labs around the world. It holds the Alex Tanous library filled with hundreds of books on the various subjects parapsychology encompasses. Though it has not been associated with Duke University for many decades, it is located near the campus and attracts many academics from the University.
Sally Rhine Feather
I have had the distinct pleasure to have met and befriended their daughter, Sally Rhine Feather who, in her nineties, is still very active at the Center and who inspired me to write the Calliope O’Callahan novels. The Psy Syndicate is an amalgam of several parapsychology research centers like the Rhine, but I consider the Rhine my classroom filled with very smart, lovely people.
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.
