Social anthropologist, consciousness researcher, Professor at Sofia Univ, and curious explorer of culture, science, and the wonder of it all.

Research

10 Nov

Posted at 10:04h in Featured, News and Press, Research

A recent article published in the online magazine, Uplift, discusses Marilyn Schlitz's parapsychology experiments. Dr. Marilyn Schlitz has conducted some of the most prominent parapsychology experiments in history. In the lab, she has explored psi phenomena like the ability of a person’s thoughts to physically affect another person’s body. She has taught at Trinity University, Stanford University, Harvard Medical Centers, and currently at Silicon Valley’s Sofia University. She has lectured at institutions including the United Nations and the Smithsonian Institution. Schlitz has been instrumental in making inroads for parapsychology into mainstream science—in starting to bridge the gap between believers and skeptics. But even if skeptics...

18 Jul

Posted at 14:26h in Featured, News and Press, Research

A recent article published in the online magazine, Inverse, details the the life and dreaming culture of the indigenous Achuar peoples of the Amazon. I was interviewed for this piece, drawing upon my experiences working with and conducting anthropological research with this thriving jungle community 20 years ago. Specifically, I had studied the dreaming culture of the Achuar who interpret dreams daily to inform their lives and act for their future. In partnership with a dozen young Achuar men who agreed to record their dreams for the course of one year, the collaboration yielded a deep perspective into the power of sharing dreams amongst a community, and...

20 Jun

Posted at 13:13h in Featured, Research, Transformation

What does it mean to be part of a greater whole? How does our worldview, or model of reality, impact what we understand about who we are and how we relate to others? And how can we become more aware of all the ways we are part of an interrelated, global community? It’s clear that we are social beings from the very beginning of life. Social relations impact every aspect of our being. Of course, there is developmental variability in the extent to which each of us is aware of culture’s impact on us. It takes a level of perceptual acuity,...

19 Jun

Posted at 11:31h in Featured, News and Press, Research, Transformation

Recently the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies (IJTS) published a paper I co-wrote titled: "Engagement in a Community-Based Integral Practice Program Enhances Well-being." The article reports on a study examining a wellness intervention and its effect on health outcomes. In publication for over 30 years, the IJTS is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the California Institute of Integral Studies, and serves as the official publication of the International Transpersonal Association. Participants in the study used a community-based program called Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) and provided questionnaire data before, during, and after the one-year period in the program. Significant improvements were seen in overall health,...

07 Oct

Posted at 06:41h in Death and Afterlife, Death Makes Life Possible, Featured, healthcare, News and Press, Research

The September issue of Spirituality in Clinical Practice published an article I authored titled, "Gaining perspective on death: Training program and language use outcomes assessment." With co-authors, Jonathan Schooler, Alan Pierce, Angela Murphy, and Arnaud Delorme, this paper examined how structured, supportive discourse on death, dying and what may happen after can have positive, therapeutic outcomes, especially in clinical contexts for both patients and caregivers. We used journaling data from a telecourse I taught called, "Death Makes Life Possible: Mapping Worldviews of the Afterlife," to specifically highlight the various ways the course material may have shifted participants' relationship with death, dying, and their own mortality. These...

21 Feb

Posted at 17:37h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

  Final Reflections Through my work and my life experiences, I have seen that the transformative process involves a change in self that includes both our inner and our outer realities. It provides links between our direct experiences and our being in the world through action and service. Bridging the Akashic and the rational has allowed me to develop a deeper and richer sense of connection to myself, my family, my community, and my environment. In this process, I have developed an increasing awareness and appreciation for the sacred in every aspect of life. As each of us lives into expanded human capacities,...

14 Feb

Posted at 07:21h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

The Quest for a New Paradigm This leads me back to where I started: questing for a fundamental paradigm, cosmology, or story of the world that’s inclusive enough to embrace the Akashic, noetic dimensions while not losing sight of what is real and true in the objective and intersubjective realms of lived experience. We are alive in a time of enormous complexity—how do we make sense of the fact that a Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, secular humanist, and Pagan are all using the same grocery stores, public schools, and health care centers? How is it that a materialist scientist can sit with...

07 Feb

Posted at 20:13h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Exceptional and Transformative Experiences Over time, I have sought to understand the nature of psi and other Akashic experiences outside the laboratory. Obtaining a Ph.D. in anthropology, I felt that qualitative methods may reveal details that are left on the cutting room floor in our lab-based studies. I have been interested in how exceptional experiences impact people’s lives in ways that are transformative. This has led me to engage in a decade of research on what stimulates transformation, what sustains it, and what results from experiences that open us to a larger set of possibilities. In a recent book, Living Deeply: The...

31 Jan

Posted at 19:31h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

 The Effect of Distant Mental Intention on Living Systems A third study that I will mention involves my work on distant intention and healing. For more than a decade, I collaborated with William Braud at the Mind Science Foundation to develop a research protocol that allows us to study the correlation between one person’s intention and another person’s physiology. This is a procedure we eventually came to call distant mental interactions between living systems (DMILS). The idea behind the work was to simulate an experience in the laboratory that would allow us to study psychic healing, only working with healthy people who...

24 Jan

Posted at 19:09h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

 Exploring Psi in the Lab Since this early phase of my career, more than three decades ago, I have had many compelling encounters with the Akashic experience. Unlike most people, however, many of my personal encounters have occurred in the context of well-controlled laboratory experiments. Let me consider three specific examples from my formal research. Remote Viewing In 1980 I conducted a remote viewing experiment with Elmar Gruber in which we were both the subjects and the experimenters. We designed a formal study of ten trials over thousands of kilometers between Detroit, Michigan and Rome, Italy. Gruber selected a pool of geographical target sites...

17 Jan

Posted at 06:45h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Psychic Exploration When I was an undergraduate, I had several meaningful events that helped shape my life. The first was reading Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolution. This book, and the idea that our paradigms of reality are socially constructed and not absolute, was nothing short of a conceptual liberation. It gave me hope that the failing vision of society that was around me need not be final or binding. Indeed, even in the context of science, we have experienced different models of reality—one replacing another. What was needed for our society, I felt sure, was a fundamental, whole systems...

10 Jan

Posted at 22:08h in Featured, Non-Fiction, Research

Where does one’s story start? I begin mine with what I don’t remember. At eighteen months old, as I am told by my family, I found a can of lighter fluid on the table. Being a curious child, I did what curious children do: I put it into my mouth. For months after, my small body rested and wrestled in a hospital, floating in and out of life as my lungs sought the affirmation of breath. Perhaps it was here, in the entrusted hands of a dedicated group of health professionals, in the prayers and intentions of my devoted family, in...

20 Dec

Posted at 12:13h in Featured, Research

UPDATE: This article will appear in the soon-to-be-released latest edition of The Write Stuff: Thinking Through Essays by Pearson Canada. Looking forward to it! As philosopher John Locke observed: “New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.” So, what limits our desire and capacity to take in new ideas, even when we hold an intention to transform and to grow? What are the barriers to changing our minds and behaviors? How can we develop habits that allow us to explore our own biases? How can we learn to recognize our own...

09 Dec

Posted at 09:00h in Death and Afterlife, Death Makes Life Possible, Research

How can we understand our own and other’s worldviews about death? To answer this compelling question, I have conducted extensive interviews over the past decade with cultural experts and scientists, focusing on diverse worldviews concerning death and the afterlife. A content analysis was conducted on these interviews to identify thematic trends across individuals representing different cultural, spiritual and religious worldviews. From this analysis, a telecourse and web-based learning program was developed. This was organized into a six-part telecourse that was offered as a benefit to Institute of Noetic Sciences members and to others who learned of the course through diverse networks. The...