My wife Judy and I have just completed a 6-day retreat on Dzogchen approaches to liberation with lama Tsoknyi Rinpoche, held at Mt. Madonna Conference Center. Now it’s a couple of days of camping in a redwood park to cool down, before jumping fully back into ordinary life, but I’ve been reflecting a lot and [...]
As readers of this blog or my recent The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together know, I have long been concerned with the psychological and spiritual damage the world view I call Dismissive Materialism does to people. The idea that there is no inherent meaning or purpose [...]
Much of my research and writing about parapsychological subjects is somewhat abstract, dealing with laboratory experiments and what they might mean. I’m just finishing teaching a course on basic Parapsychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and trying to give students some personal feel for the material and its importance in human life, not just [...]
Continue reading about Real People, Parapsychology, Broken Hearts, Survival
Many of you know that one of my primary interests is building bridges between first-class science and first-class spirituality, so they can stimulate each other. My The End of Materialism book in 2009 was a major effort in this direction, arguing that, given scientific evidence, it is reasonable to be both scientific and spiritual in [...]
Continue reading about Toward An Evidence-Based Spirituality for the 21st Century
I will be offering a basic parapsychology class online for the first time at ITP in the Winter quarter of 2011. For those who are interested in a good reading list on parapsychology or an idea of what my course is like, I have included a shortened (leaving out stuff about writing standards for student [...]
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My wife Judy and I are at a 10-day Tibetan Buddhist retreat in San Diego this week (November 26 through December 6, 2010), run by Lama Sogyal Rinpoche and his Rigpa Fellowship organization. We’ve been coming to these retreats for more than 20 years, and I have enormous respect for Rinpoche’s knowledge and compassion. But [...]
I recently got an email from an old friend and colleague about a possibly psychic dream. I’m not going to report on that here, it’s old hat for me to hear about dreams that provide psychic info on real-world events, but some of the other ideas his email stimulated in me may be of interest, [...]
Continue reading about Ghosts, Horror Movies, Death and the Spiritual Path
Some parapsychologist colleagues and I were discussing the many shortcomings of the way the media covers scientific parapsychology recently. I contributed a little memory that was sort of amusing, but really sad, that I think would be of general interest. Twenty years or more ago I was asked to come to Hollywood, at their expense [...]
In a discussion groups of parapsychologists I host, we’ve been thinking about why religion, Western religion in particular, is often against the paranormal. There are a couple of obvious reasons, such as an establishment of priests (human being with their own hopes and fears) not wanting possible competition from people directly dealing with spiritual and [...]
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Recently I asked my old friend and leading transpersonal psychologist Arthur Deikman to look over the draft of an article I will be submitting to the journal Subtle Energies, based on my Presidential address earlier this year for ISSSEEM (The International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine), where I advocate that [...]
Continue reading about Why Am I Trying to Bridge Science and Spirituality?