[Francis Buck]

I've always found that stuff with the monks controlling their body temperature and withstanding great amounts of pain and physical trauma with no injury to be very interesting, and though it's been a while, I don't remember seeing much focused scientific research on it (I may be totally ignorant to it though, like I said I haven't looked into it in a while).

[sciborg2]

I've always found that stuff with the monks controlling their body temperature and withstanding great amounts of pain and physical trauma with no injury to be very interesting, and though it's been a while, I don't remember seeing much focused scientific research on it (I may be totally ignorant to it though, like I said I haven't looked into it in a while).

I think a lot of this came down to regulation of the body via specific breathing exercises. There might've been something in there that remained an open question of possible mind o'er matter but I can't recall it now.

=-=-=

This seems like an odd nugget in Academia.edu? ->

The Science of Life Discovered from Lynnclaire Dennis' Near-Death Experience:

https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Near-Death_Experiences

"Elsevier publishes an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery found in a near-death experience. This new geometric structure matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems with applications in general systems theory, a universal systems model, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrophysics, education and other areas of study. A unique near-death experience happened to Lynnclaire Dennis during an accident while racing a hot air balloon across the Austrian Alps in 1987. She saw a complex geometric structure – a knot of Light she recognized was life itself, light spinning time and space; transforming energy into matter. In specific terms, it is a dual polyhedra: one polyhedron inside another. The inner most polyhedron is diamond-like; has 144 triangular faces and grows to 300. In its dynamics, light emerges from 48 vertices. The outer polyhedron is watery, akin to a bubble; it has 120 triangular faces and grows to 180 faces. In the space between the two polyhedra, the energetic interconnection between the two, ties into multiple pattern knots. With no knowledge of mathematics or geometry, Lynnclaire Dennis was able to provide a detailed description of this dynamic structure. According to the University of Illinois Chicago knot theorist, Dr. Louis H. Kauffman, the knot discovered by Dennis is a previously unknown version of the Trefoil knot. It is geospherical and polarized. In 1998, the relationship between the knot and the geometry was verified by Robert W. Gray, a protégée of renowned geometer R. Buckminster Fuller. Because of this, the scientific interest in this unique structure captured the attention of top scientists around the world when its prime frequency derived by the mathematics - a "rational" golden ration - generated the entire Matrix in the natural medium of water using a CymaScope. Dennis' structure provides a sequential process generating a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social."

[SilentRoamer]

I had an old VHS cassette as a kid that had some monks balancing on swords and spears and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Some of that definetely looked mind over matter.

[sciborg2]

I had an old VHS cassette as a kid that had some monks balancing on swords and spears and all sorts of crazy stuff.

Some of that definetely looked mind over matter.

I've seen those as well, but I think it can be explained via mundane means.

I know there's some Robert Anton Wilson fans around, thought this quote was interesting:

Those who reject even telepathy have reached the point where they are impugning either the honesty or the sanity of several thousand scientific researchers on all major continents over a period of decades. Such expedient ways of disposing of data are shared only by the most ardent anti-Evolutionists among the Fundamentalist sects.
—R.A. Wilson, Cosmic Trigger

But then RAW was known for his fondness of parapsychology. More interesting to me is this section of Turing's COMPUTING MACHINERY AND INTELLIGENCE:

(9) The Argument from Extrasensory Perception

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP; that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.

It'd be interesting to see what evidence was so convincing. Was it genuine? Was it merely parlor tricks that fooled unwary scientists?

I prefer to be agnostic about such things, because it seems unfair to appeal to the authority of scientists only when they say things in line with our modern conception of reality. For example, how many of us can really refute the arguments of the Intelligent Designer without recourse to shaming tactics of the "Only stupid people believe in that!" variety? That kind of tactic, IMO, may be pragmatic but ultimately is beneath my sense of intellectual integrity.

Far better, IMO, to point out that even if ID were true it would not mean Yaweh was real, or any deity was responsible. The Nobel winning physicist Josephson has a theory that involves Wheeler's idea that the observer in QM has an effect on determining reality, and that this produces physical laws as well as natural selection. (See here + here.)

In the case of ESP, I prefer to just wait and see if anyone can find a smoking gun for this sort of thing.

[sciborg2]

Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal

http://paranthropologyjournal.weebly.com/

Established in 2010, “Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal" is a free on-line journal devoted to the promotion of social-scientific approaches to the study of paranormal experiences, beliefs and phenomena in all of their varied guises. The journal aims to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue on issues of the paranormal, so as to move beyond the sceptic vs. advocate impasse which has settled over the current debate, and to open new avenues for enquiry and understanding.

Paranthropology holds no standard position on these issues and all views expressed are those of the each particular author. Paranthropology is devoted to an open-minded and exploratory perspective on a wide range of experiences, beliefs and phenomena often called paranormal, supernatural or anomalous.

[sciborg2]

A Conversation with Shannon Taggart: Photographer of Séances, Spirits and Ectoplasm

http://therevealer.org/archives/19370

He was seated in front of a low red light,” she said. The room was dark, otherwise. After twenty minutes, the medium’s wife announced that spirits were going to begin working with his hands. Taggart remembered the next moment very clearly: “He just brought out his hand. What I saw, with my eyes, was this regular hand just very gently and instantly —skip gigantic.”

“I screamed out loud,” she continued. “Which is very impolite in a séance situation.”

Taggart’s photographs have appeared in outlets such as Readers Digest, Discover Magazine and the New York Times. She’s captured dance auditions and artists’ portraits. Her approach is often unusual, and frequently relies on long exposure times, producing hallucinatory doublings, strange auras and smears of motion as her subjects move.  When she photographed Garforth, the long exposure was mostly done to compensate for a lack of light. The resulting images are jittery and blurred — Garforth moved around. They also show the medium holding up a single, grotesquely inflated hand.

“I had that experience of seeing that hand get large,” she explained. “I don’t know how it happened. Whether it’s a hand actually getting large in front of my face and I was creating a photograph that documented it, or whether it’s that I was tricked somehow or I had a hypnotic experience and then my camera, through its dysfunction, mimicked that experience…  I mean, all of those are interesting perspectives.  I love that they’re all there.” She’s been catching similarly ambiguous situations for over a decade.

[sciborg2]

Journal of Nonlocality

The Journal of Nonlocality has been set up to address an experimental and conceptual impasse in understanding the nature of nonlocality and observer effects in quantum mechanics. In conjunction with ICRL’s Mind-Matter Mapping Project, we hope to create a research venue where cutting-edge experimental tools in physics, biology and parapsychology can be combined to design more revealing protocols; to bypass the experimental difficulties identified by Wheeler and Bell; and to cast new light on the role that these effects play in genetic regulatory systems, placebo, anomalous perception and retrocausality.

This is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.

[sciborg2]

Tuning In - Spirit Channelers In America (Full Length)

Tuning In is a truly unique spiritual documentary, the result of 10 years of inquiry into the phenomenon of spirit channeling by Los Angeles filmmaker, David Thomas. Channeling is a practice dating back to antiquity wherein an individual, usually in a trance state, makes a psychic connection with a spirit being. The channeler is then able to act as a dimensional go-between in bringing other humans in contact with the entity, as well as interpreting messages from the entity.

For the very first time, six of North America's most prominent channelers are featured in the same film. Viewers gain a rare glimpse and insight into the phenomenon, as well as the information being received by these channelers. The entities coming through each have a strong and distinct personality and were interviewed at length by the filmmaker. The result is truly remarkable. The messages cross through space and time, and it appears the entities are speaking as one, delivering a clear and profound message of empowerment for humankind.

[sciborg2]

Apparently by professional skeptic Michael Shermer:

Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.

Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.