New Books and Media

From the publisher’s website: This new book is a series of essays related and responding to the PEAR laboratory publication, “Sensors, Filters, and the Source of Reality." This anthology presents an assortment of perspectives on how consciousness creates its experiential reality through an array of subjective “filters” by which “we endeavor to infer, either intuitively or analytically, composite functional models of our world and of ourselves.” Taken together, the individual contributions serve as an array of lenses that amplify the seminal essay.

From the publisher’s website: How the ghost stories of pagan times reveal the seamless union existing between the world of the living and the afterlife.

• Demonstrates how Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today

• Explains how the returning dead were once viewed as either troublemakers or guarantors of the social order

The impermeable border the modern world sees existing between the world of the living and the afterlife was not visible to our ancestors. The dead could--and did--cross back and forth at will. The pagan mind had no fear of death, but some of the dead were definitely to be dreaded: those who failed to go peacefully into the afterlife but remained on this side in order to right a wrong that had befallen them personally or to ensure that the law promoted by the ancestors was being respected. But these dead individuals were a far cry from the amorphous ectoplasm that is featured in modern ghost stories. These earlier visitors from beyond the grave--known as revenants--slept, ate, and fought like men, even when, like Klaufi of the Svarfdaela Saga, they carried their heads in their arms.

Revenants were part of the ancestor worship prevalent in the pagan world and still practiced in indigenous cultures such as the Fang and Kota of equatorial Africa, among others. The Church, eager to supplant this familial faith with its own, engineered the transformation of the corporeal revenant into the disembodied ghost of modern times, which could then be easily discounted as a figment of the imagination or the work of the devil. The sanctified grounds of the church cemetery replaced the burial mounds on the family farm, where the ancestors remained as an integral part of the living community. This exile to the formal graveyard, ironically enough, has contributed to the great loss of the sacred that characterizes the modern world.

This book has been reviewed by John Newton in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research Vol 75(3).

Stuart Cumberland (1857 – 1922) astonished Europe with his pioneer performances in mindreading, drawing acclaim and fame with miracles like finding hidden objects through supposed psychic power.  A skilful writer, Cumberland (born Charles Garner) wrote several books on his life in mentalism and the techniques of phony mediums and psychics.

Our Stuart Cumberland: The Victorian Mind Reader CD brings you all of his rare mindreading publications, as well as several Cumberland-penned articles on mentalism and spiritualism, plus bonus books recounting his travels around the world.

With the help of mentalism historian Barry Wiley, we’ve also collected for you articles on his career from the Victorian press; his rare Cumberland News souvenir newspaper; and a complete Cumberland bibliography.

The CD includes over 2000 pages of material, all in convenient PDF format on CD with an index included for easy access.

Review by Tom Ruffles

From the publisher’s website: Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian search for life after death is the first full-length biography of Frederic W.H. Myers, leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research and friend and associate of Browning, Gladstone, Ruskin, Tennyson, Swinburne, Henry James, Prince Leopold and other influential Victorians. The book offers a fascinating insight into a key period in the development of Victorian thought.

Among many things it covers:

1. Extraordinary Phenomena Myers investigated extraordinary phenomena, much of which is still reported today: out of body experiences and astral projection, near death experiences, poltergeists, gurus like Madame Blavatsky claiming strange powers, mediums both private and public, and haunted houses (for example, the giant warrior haunting a chateau near Heidelberg, the Cheltenham Ghost that was seen by a considerable number of people, and the odd doings at Ballechin House in Scotland which caused a scandal in the press.

2. Life After Death Investigations Myers believed he had virtually proved life after death by a) the link he thought established between hundreds of apparitions and living or dead human beings b) the messages that the outstanding mediums Mrs Piper and Mrs Thompson gave him from his first great love Annie and his intimate friend and co-worker Edmund Gurney which contained information the medium could not know and was delivered in a way highly characteristic of the personality concerned.

3. Automatic Writing Some researchers have claimed that he has returned after death and proved his continued existence through the automatic writings of a number of mediums in England, America, India. These writings continued for thirty years.

4. Romance & Suicide There is also love, tragedy and jealousy in Myers' life. His first great love Annie, a married woman, committed suicide and Myers' wife, a rather possessive person, tried to prevent any detail about this being made public after his death, even though the relationship was platonic. This inhibited the work of researchers who were trying to verify the 'post-mortem' communications from Myers, since, for many years, they could not check the facts.

5. Credibility Myers researches led him to forming a view about human personality and psychology which Aldous Huxley has said is much richer than Freud's

From the publisher’s website: This is the story of James Leininger, who – a little more than two weeks after his second birthday – began having blood-curdling nightmares that just would not stop. When James began screaming out recurring phrases like, "Plane on fire! Little man can't get out!" the Leiningers finally admitted that they truly had to take notice.

When details of planes and war tragedies no two-year-old boy could know continued-- even in stark daylight-- Bruce and Andrea Leininger began to realize that this was an incredible situation. Soul Survivor is the story of how the Leiningers pieced together what their son was communicating and eventually discovered that he was reliving the past life of World War II fighter pilot James Huston. As Bruce Leininger struggled to understand what was happening to his son, he also uncovered details of James Huston's life-- and death-- as a pilot that will fascinate military buffs everywhere.

In Soul Survivor, we are taken for a gripping ride as the Leiningers' belief system is shaken to the core, and both of these families come to know a little boy who, against all odds and even in the face of true skeptics, harbors the soul of this man who died long ago.

Review by Zofia Weaver.

From the publisher’s website: Experts from around the world share the history and current state of near-death experience (NDE) knowledge. They explore controversies in the field, offer stories from their research, and express their hopes for the future of investigation into this fascinating phenomenon.

As modern medical techniques for resuscitation advance, NDEs are more frequently reported. These include more than the popular notions of moving through a tunnel or seeing a light. They also include people, once revived, knowing things their knowledge of which can't currently be explained. As The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation makes clear, great controversy exists in the medical and psychological fields concerning NDEs. Are they caused by physiological changes in the brain, or are they biological reactions to oxygen loss or impending death? Are they a product of changing states of consciousness? Or are they caused by something else altogether? All of these ideas and more are discussed in this unique and comprehensive volume.

Customer review: At last, a long awaited study of the controversial subject of reincarnation and its bedfellow karma. Hitherto, books on the subject have generally supported reincarnation as a reality. James Webster's new book challenges most eloquently alleged cases of reincarnation which to some offers part explanation of the purpose of life. 

The author quotes cases of spirit overshadowing, spirit attachment, false memories and the frailty of hypnotic regression which can be confused with evidence of reincarnation or past lives. Sometimes these manifestations are of a third person in the Spirit World projecting thoughts of their past life through the aura of the unwilling subject in the present. 

Webster also quotes from the research of numerous intellectuals from the fields of philosophy, psychiatry and science along with contributions from the pioneers of spiritualism and psychical research, past and present. Most interesting are accounts of the work of Dr. Carl Wickland, an American psychiatrist whose work in spirit attachment is becoming recognised in modern psychiatry. Dr. Wickland helped patients who had been mentally disturbed by confused thoughts of being reincarnated or holding attachments of persons in spirit attempting to reincarnate. This milestone book is a must read and represents a definitive reference for students of spiritualism and philosophy.

From the publisher’s website: It is the most comprehensive handbook on subtle energy: 720 pages, 1,500 references, 450 figures, it establishes the science and the physics which backs up and explains many mysteries, including long distance healing, the nature of the aura, and how shamanism creates instantaneous changes.  It explains what "subtle energy," also called "chi," prana, "orgone" and torsion, really is. It explains what energy healers are really doing when they send their energy to a faraway client. It connects the mystical part with the scientific part of healing. Devices are now being built and patented, and equations being developed which integrate this ancient and elusive force with modern science.

Dr. Claude Swanson was educated as a physicist at MIT and Princeton University. During those years he worked at the MIT Science Teaching Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory and a Virginia cyclotron in the summer. At Princeton he received the National Science Foundation Fellowship and Putnam Fellowship. His Ph.D. thesis at Princeton was done in the "Gravity Group," which focuses on experimental cosmology and astronomy.

For the last fifteen years, interspersed with his conventional professional career in applied physics, Dr. Swanson has pursued investigations into "unconventional physics." His principal interest has been unified field theory, the so-called "Theory of Everything" which could explain the universe at the deepest possible level. This has led him to investigate many aspects of the paranormal, which appear to be completely real phenomena which violate our present science. Paranormal phenomena, which have now been proven in the laboratory in many cases, offer a window into the deeper universe, the mysteries of consciousness, and unlock new forces and principles which conventional science has only begun to glimpse.

From the publisher’s website: Charles Tart reconciles the scientific and spiritual worlds by looking at empirical evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena that point toward our spiritual nature, including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing. Science seems to tell us that we are all meaningless products of blind biological and chemical forces, leading meaningless lives that will eventually end in death. The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place. In this book, transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives.

From the publisher’s website: Can people really see into the future? Can someone's life be predicted? Are physicists on the verge of discovering the first time machine? And why does a Nobel prize-winning scientist believe that humans are capable of sensing the future?

Following a prediction of his sister's death, William Little sets out to find the truth about the power of fortune telling and prophecy. On a journey that takes him to a witches' coven in a haunted wood, on the hunt for murderers with psychic detectives and to the doorsteps of the world s most powerful and revered psychics, William Little goes on a desperate quest to find out whether people can see into the future - or if the many millions who consult horoscopes, watch TV psychics, or who read Nostradamus are simply being sold a lie.

Through a rollercoaster ride of mystics, mishaps and mayhem, he discovers uncomfortable facts that make him reassess his beliefs. In a book that answers the unanswerable about what science, psychics, and crystal balls can reveal about tomorrow, William Little lifts the lid on the most sought-after destination of them all - the future. Includes interviews with US psychic Sylvia Browne, CIA psychic spy Joseph McMoneagale, Sally Morgan, Derren Brown, Richard Dawkins, Channel Five's Psychic Challenge winner Diane Lazarus, experts such as Professor Brian Josephson and Dr Richard Wiseman and Allison Dubois, whose life was the basis for the NBC and BBC programme Medium. William Little is a freelance journalist.

From the publisher’s website: Contemporary science holds that the brain rules the body and generates all our feelings and perceptions. Michael Jawer and Dr. Marc Micozzi disagree. They contend that it is our feelings that underlie our conscious selves and determine what we think and how we conduct our lives. The less consciousness we have of our emotional being, the more physical disturbances we are likely to have, from ailments such as migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and post-traumatic stress to anomalous perceptions such as apparitions and involuntary out-of-body experiences. Using the latest scientific research on immunity, sensation, stress, cognition and emotional expression, the authors demonstrate that the way we process our feelings provides a key as to who is most likely to experience these phenomena and why. They explain that emotion is a portal into the world of extraordinary perception and they provide the studies that validate the science behind telepathic dreams, poltergeists and ESP. The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion challenges the prevailing belief that the brain must necessarily rule the body. Far from being by-products of neurochemistry, the authors show that emotions are the key vehicle by which we can understand ourselves and our interactions with the world around us as well as our most intriguing and perennially baffling experiences. • Contends that emotion is the greatest influence on personality development • Offers a new perspective on immunity, stress, and psychosomatic conditions • Explains how emotion is key to understanding out-of-body experience, apparitions, and other anomalous perceptions.