Send Them Peace

"Where can I learn about how to meet The Challenge ?"

There are steps along the path ...

This video lasts 30 minutes. That duration will put some visitors off. But it is the most efficient source for understanding the Steps to meeting The Challenge.

Some have suggested that it is also not a bad guide for how to live one's life, but that is a peripheral benefit. Or is it somehow more central?

Don't have 30 minutes?

... how about 13 seconds? Play the video for 13 seconds, then stop it and look at our Wheel of The 12 Presences.

Or look here below the video, and review/ save the image for the 12 Presences, the path to follow to optimize awareness in preparing to meet The Challenge.

And come back when you have more time, to listen to the explanation ...

Prefer to read it offline when you can find the time ?

Download and save The 12 Presences in PDF format by clicking on the link.

(to Save, right-click on image, and select "Save Image As ..." )

"I don't think I can do this ... How can I know if I'm strong enough to make this happen ?"

Simple.

Enter 12 values in our Peace Warrior Evaluator  here below, to see a summary of your strengths and weakness, and where they are located.

For each step in The Challenge process, enter a value from 0 to 5. This value is a summary reflection of your understanding and perceived ability for this particular "presence" or desired quality found in Peace Warriors.  The "12 presences" have been described elsewhere. Perhaps before entering answers here, re-read that summary of the steps on which The Challenge is based. Then for each one, ask yourself questions such as : "How clearly do I understand this desired quality or step in the process?" And perhaps: "How capable do I consider myself to be today, to put this step into practice?" And lastly: "Would doing what this step requires, be consistent with who I am, or go completely against the grain of who I consider myself to be?" 

Assessing one's current capabilities is the first step to embarking on training as a Peace Warrior. Don't worry about your score on this day, or any day. There is no passing or failing score. But use this Evaluator from time to time, answering as accurately as possible. Then put it aside for a while and come back to it later, to see what has changed. The effect on yourself of practicing The Challenge regularly, may surprise you. You won't need the Evaluator to convince you of that. On the other hand, having an objective opinion, and several assessments over time, may be of interest.

To begin, click "Reset" below to reset the radiobuttons, then click to select each answer. This without feeling rushed. You can select an "x" if you find that you simply have no basis for answering.

Clicking "Submit" when you're done will send us a copy of your results, all this anonymously of course. There is no field or answer given in this form, which could be used to identify you personally. The results of many over time, will be used to suggest which "steps on the path," may need more clarification or support.

To get a sense of what your submitted evaluation looks like on our end, click this link to see an actual result in PDF format.

Click "Print" to send your evaluation today to your printer. And finally, here is a link to our Peace Warrior Evaluator if this form does not display correctly here.

A last word about how to choose. Select :

• "x" if you can find no relation to the word or words presented. No basis for answering. When one clicks "Reset," the form sets all values to "x."
• "0" suggests that while you understand the Step Along The Path that a Peace Warrior would take, you have no ability here at all. Example: "Timeliness." You may realize that since you have yet to be on time for anything in your life, it is not a personal strong point. Someone from Management might say: "An opportunity for improvement exists."
• "1" thru "4" - varying levels of understanding; of agreement with its inclusion as a step on the path; of ability to know how one does this; how one takes the step; resistance to moving on to that step; uncertainty about one's current level of mastery, of being able to find the step and tread fully upon it without falling into what is not the step.
• "5" suggests a strong sense of understanding, agreement, technical mastery of methodology, no resistance, centered in the Step and one with it. This response implies that you sit comfortable with this step of The Challenge. You are a Zen archer flying with the arrow when it is ready to leave your bow, to be one with its Target. Arrow and Target are One, and always were. That's a "5." 

Congratulations ! 

Part I, the history of the turbulent beginnings and continued relationship of psychology and psychical research, can be read by clicking the link.

Part II concerns where we are now. And because what follows is recent enough that a historical perspective or light cannot yet be shone upon it, several examples will have to suffice. In all of these, parts of the "evidence" offered may be dismissed, but perhaps some parts kept, in our search for a common thread, and more importantly, tools that serve us in meeting The Challenge.

Part II begins with this link to a style of medical practice, which the participants introduced by Part I would have shuddered at. At a minimum, hoping that such charlatanism would never have come into being. Yet here we are. Here it is. It exists. It is now embraced by a major University's Medical Center and System. It is not only, not charlatanism, but it works for it's patients/ clients/ participants (select your favorite term for those seeking compassionate care). Imagine: a Center for Integrative Medicine.

Recall that the introductory subject was "telepathy," and that the overarching or foundational subject is: Send(ing)ThemPeace. 

So, ... what do we use to meet The Challenge? Our brains. Some will argue quickly: "No! We let our brains go to sleep and use our hearts. Our hearts send and receive compassion!" While appreciating the sentiment, instructions like: "Quiet your thoughts. Rest in the Present. Focus on your breathing and mantra," would seem to involve the brain at least just a little bit for starters. And in fact involving the brain probably even longer than initial phases of sitting (zazen), as one gets locked in (in a good sense), to one's practice.

Is it important to know how the brain works,

understanding functional characteristics of thinking, to be able to meet The Challenge?

Perhaps not, on the one hand. On the other, applying anything learned about how the brain perceives, decodes, and processes during The Challenge,... might be of use, so why risk losing that possibility?

Have a look at this video, to quickly and painlessly learn just a bit more, about how the brain thinks. Usually without realizing it, as we get up, yawn, go brush our teeth and move into our day, the brain is taking in information, but not always using the systems or methods we thought to, well,... think :

Let's do a bit more observation : 

1. A man known for demonstrated telepathic abilities, (done professionally) is placed in a functional MRI scanner, and a telepathy task is defined and carried out. It is controlled with scans of a non-telepathic subject, who does the same task. The goal in this article is not to quickly offer this as proof, in answer to the question posed in Part I and here above that "telepathy exists," nor, "yes, I believe in telepathy." It is instead to simply observe, and collect what is useful for The Challenge. The test: a person draws something, witnessed by two others. The telepathist, in the scanner in another room, is asked to draw what was drawn. He does: Very accurately or close to the original. The (non-telepathist) person serving as a control, tries and fails miserably. Both subjects undergo a functional MRI scan during all this. In the telepathist, a region of the brain called the parahippocampal gyrus "lights up" prominently on the scan. A completely different region "lights up" in the control brain. (See images below). In a separate but similar study, done of a second telephathist, again recognized for his abilities, the same parahippocampal region "lights up" prominently. The abstract of these experiments is given here :

 Here is a gallery with the various images from these studies :

So right away, this observation prompts many questions:

• Was the science good? Not bad, though some object that the "non-telepathist" control might have had some unknown telepathic skills.
• Of course: "How does he do that?" The telepathist can do this repeatedly, but says he doesn't know exactly how he does it.
• Since telepathy is the ending or receiving of thoughts from another being in the absence of sensory input, the focus shifts quickly to,... "Gee, that's a pretty good trick. Could I learn how to do that? Could knowing how to do that help me send compassion to other individuals during The Challenge?" Wouldn't that be interesting and perhaps useful?
• "Say, what does that parahippocampal region that "lights up" during telepathy, do anyway? I mean, ... usually?"

So let's look more closely at the parahippocampal gyrus (PHG) region of the brain. In the above experiment, it is the non-dominant PHG which is activated. The telepathist is right handed. His brain's "dominant hemisphere" is the left one. The non-dominant PHG is on the right side of his brain. Here is a gallery of pictures of the PHG (there will not be a test to follow). Do what with these images? Just have a look. Neuroanatomists first gave names to brain regions based on how they looked. This while having absolutely no idea, I mean, not a clue, ... what a given named region did. On the brain surface, the "bumps" are Gyri, singular Gyrus. The ravines between gyri are Sulci, singular Sulcus. Let's have a look:

Now that you've seen it, what does the parahippocampus do? Even as recently as 1976, when my professor of Neuroanatomy would explain how a given gyrus had come to be named, knowing what it did was beyond him. So the parahippocampal gyrus, of course, means "one of the circular bumps on the brain surface (gyrus) that is located right next to (para) that other bump that looks like a seahorse (hippocampus)." Dr. Johnson rarely forgot to add, his hands in the air: "Why? ... we do not know." It did not take long for our class to learn to anticipate and repeat this phrase in unison, à haute voix, though that answer never seemed to suffice on the exam.

Brain function was first studied by neurologists and neurophysiologists in the setting of brain injured beings (humans by accidents or illness, and usually rats or mice, but also others, intentionally injured in the lab).

Examples of how loss of a specific region of the brain (assuming a non-lethal accident of course), can produce amazing (and let's not forget to include, sad...) results in human behavior and faculties,.... have been collected by Oliver Sacks, MD in his book: "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat." One example out of many, you can read here in the account at right. As students, someone would eventually, invariably ask: "What is the treatment for that?" And the professor's answer was almost invariably: "Not a thing. There is no treatment. Let's move on." And thanking the patient, we moved on. And if the professor's answer seemed to some to lack compassion, he still remained courageously in this difficult field of medicine, caring for those with often catastrophic results of accidents and illness, and had learned to not waste his compassion, saving energy instead for those where infrequently, treatment was possible. My thought at the time was that the untreatable patient still needed and merited compassion as well, done however one could. But we moved on.

So if telepathists "turn on" their non-dominant parahippocampal gyrus, what is it doing, even if they don't know it at the time? If a patient "loses" this region of the brain through a very localized stroke (loss of blood supply), what is the result? Fortunately, waiting for an illness or injury to knock out an area of brain and its function, as a means of learning more, has been one upped as a learning tool. PET (positron emission tomography) scans and functional MRI (fMRI) have added immensely to structure-function-location studies of the brain and human cognition.

Luzzi (2000) reported a man who had a non-dominant (right-sided in the brain) loss of the parahippocampal gyrus. The patient lost his ability to find his way around a new environment. Lesions produced in rats create the same result. So visuo-spatial processing is now out of whack. But in other patients, in addition to getting lost, episodic memory was also affected or completely wiped out. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual who, what, when, where, why knowledge) that can be explicitly stated. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place. One might ask: "How, or why, do these two functions go together." The PHG seems to be involved in many different functions and to act in concert with many other regions to accomplish those functions. Its physical location, places it not in that outer and more recently enlarged cortex, but deep within the brain. This is where neurons that assure functions essential to life since we crawled out of the swamp, are conserved and protected. A lizard, a mouse, an ape, a human, (and anatomical comparisons should be made with caution),... all have a PHG hidden deep, deep inside. And while it may seem uniform on its surface, the PHG can be divided into different zones of neuronal function. Some respond to visual stimuli, some odor stimuli, and some auditory stimuli, taking part in emotional reactions to these stimuli as well.

Here are quotes from an article (Aminoff et al., 2013) that you can download as PDF by clicking the link. In what follows PHG is also abbreviated PHC, parahippocampus.

Of course, none of this explains what the telepathist is doing. But it does suggest that science is now more closely interested, and quite objectively so.  Has an era, and this beyond mutual tolerance, of cooperation emerged between still unexplained psychical phenomenon, psychology, and other disciplines of brain science?

Next observation...

You recall perhaps, an article written here on monkeys, who used their minds to move things in space. The researcher responsible for those monkeys, (Miguel Nicolelis) who's goal is primarily independent movement for paraplegics by transducing their thoughts into movement of sensor-equipped exoskeletons, ... These are Brain-Machine Interfaces. This neuroengineer also mentions another term: brain-to-brain communication (B2B). Does that sound like telepathy?

While still a distant reality apart from exciting but rudimentary laboratory experiments, B2B is close enough to be causing effects and repercussions. Researchers like Bernard Perbal and others concerned with its development, are starting to formulate approaches to address the ethical issues of B2B. While this is referred to with astronaut words like : "a giant step for mankind," the possibility of harm coming out of this Pandora's Box is also presented as being very real.

Quoting Perbal:

JB Trimper et al. share similar concerns about Brain-To-Brain Interfaces, as summarized here in the Conclusion of their paper, "When I Become We." 

 Their concerns are summarized in the following table:

Such concens would not be voiced for long, nor carefully thought through and organized, if the  transition to BTBI, rather then being sensed as real, present, or imminent, was felt instead to be a century away. 

Can The Challenge here at SendThemPeace.com be viewed as a Brain-To-Brain Interface? Imagine: 5,000 individuals, applying a still evolving methodology to send a message of Compassion and Peace to a soldier half-way around the world that intends : "put down your automatic weapon. Go home. You are needed there." ... and he does. Is that a collective Brain-To-Brain Interface, and are there ethical concerns? Some would respond: "Oh, just do your 20 minute meditation, and don't worry about it." 

Again, the real point here is to point out that the past attitude (see Part I) of psychology and its science towards consciousness and "psi" phenomenon, represented here by "telepathy" but also including phenomenon like "Distant Healing," now seem to have the full attention of Science as entities to be fully accepted, understood and mastered. 

We are living a quite impressive time of scientific transition, shift, evolution.

Next Observation 

The apparently evolved attitude of mainstream science, at least currently, will not always present conclusions that fit perfectly, nor easily, with what "Spirituality" has "known for centuries," and as expressed in various traditions. Nevertheless, if one can, as advised above, extract what is useful for our goal here in meeting The Challenge, all the better. Avoiding a reversal of prior bias and scientific bigotry, avoids also throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Here is an example:  Superior Pattern Processing is the essence of the evolved human brain (Matk P. Mattson - Laboratory of Neurosciences - NIH Biomedical Research Center)

The abstract is in itself intriguing, and invites already, reaction to what is being advanced:

The above article certainly merits being read. Some will find certain conclusions (such as the existence of "God" as one example of magical thinking, with elements indestinguishable from certain psychiatric illnesses, and contributing to much of humanity's current difficulties ...), as difficult to to find value in. Other observations, such as the great importance of powerful emotional experiences as effective contributors to the process of superior pattern processing and everything that goes with it such as intelligence, imagination and invention, ... will be more potentially useful. Unfortunately, Mattson throws out beauty with his selected example of William Blake's art as magical "God" thinkiing, which he takes as yet another example of psychiatric disorder. Even if at the time this was published, Mattson had not discovered how to identify Spirit in himself and others, one can certainly hope that this can still change with time. Here we'll simply underline : emotional experiences as effective contributors to awareness becoming thought, becoming action.

He includes telepathy in that same list of imagined reality arising from magical thinking. Many of his contemporaries would not be in agreement.

And his inclusion of the importance of emotion as an essential component of our methodology here, is seconded below :

Positive Emotions, Spirituality and the Practice of Psychiatry

 George E. Vaillant, M.D.

*Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, USA

Brigham and Women's Hospital, 1249 Boylston Street, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA  02215 USA

ABSTRACT

"This paper proposes that eight positive emotions: awe, love (attachment), trust (faith), compassion, gratitude, forgiveness, joy and hope constitute what we mean by spirituality. These emotions have been grossly ignored by psychiatry. The two sciences that I shall employ to demonstrate this definition of spirituality will be ethology and neuroscience. They are both very new. I will argue that spirituality is not about ideas, sacred texts and theology; rather, spirituality is all about emotion and social connection. 

Last Observation

(at least in this article!)

Some current authors do manage a less harsh rapprochement of the Scientific and Spiritual Realms. 

"Intuitive Intelligence, Self-regulation, and Lifting Consciousness"
Rollin McCraty, PhD, United States; Maria Zayas, EdD, United States

... provides one such example. I think you will enjoy reading this work.  And if time, here by the same authors is an offering on The Global Coherence Initiative. It makes for compelling reading as well.

Here is their conclusion :

"The studies demonstrating that a relatively small number of the population who are intentionally meditating to create positive benefits supports the hypothesis that humanity is connected via a global field. Hence, we believe that the scientific research investigating how we are both impacted by the earth’s energetic fields and the potential for detecting effects of collective human emotion and intention in the field environment is an important aspect of the GCIs goals.

However, even if we are not able to prove the encoding of human intention in the global fields in the next few years, we are confident that we can facilitate a deeper understanding of the mechanisms by which human health and behaviors are modulated by the earth’s fields and further clarify which aspects of the field environment mediate the varied and specific effects. More important is GCI’s primary goal, which is to motivate more people to work together in a more coherent and collaborative manner to increase harmony in the collective consciousness to alleviate social conflicts and to improve the environmental impact we have on the planet and assist in planetary evolution. 

Seems like we have here come full circle,

and returned to SendThemPeace.com and The Challenge.

First very briefly, people who take pleasure in correcting missnomers and medical language abuse, don't like the term: "Mental" Telepathy, even though you've heard it referred to that way, probably since you first heard about it at all.

Having tacked down that suggestion about word usage, I move on to ask:

Do you think "Spiritual Telepathy" is a possibility?

Now what would that mean or be? Perhaps using inner feeling, intuition, serendipity, and intention, to engage in dialogue with, or transmit "right perception" (lessons in Compassion and Peaceful coexistence) to another human being. Wow! A risky supposition at almost each comma in the phrase! And if even plausible, could transmitting "wrong perception" be equally possible?

First part of the response to the Title's question -

"Do You Believe In Mental Telepathy?" : in pursuit of an answer, I share with readers an observation, or several observations:

• Open heart surgery was first done on beating hearts. Often, at first, in newborns with congenital abnormalities which, unless corrected, always meant death. It was not very successful. It was hard to do. Failures here frequently still meant death. It worked for some very limited procedures, like ligating an auricular appendage, or a patent ductus arteriosus (do not worry at all, about what that could possibly mean, unless you know right off the bat).
• And then one day, extracorporeal circulation came along, this thanks to Howard Pierpont, MD's research, and that of others as well, into hypothermic preservation, (the heart-lung machine, or known to initiates as  "the pump"), and suddenly the heart ... was stopped in its beating; so it could be worked on. And at that time a pump, linked to a disc oxygenator that people got up at about 3 in the morning to assemble and sterilize before the operation at about 8 AM,... did for the rest of the body, for a little while, what the heart had done since birth: pump blood everywhere without being asked twice to do so. But now accompanied by a cooling of the circulation, which at a certain temperature, stopped the heart's beating. A stopped heart could be examined, operated, repaired :  replacing valves, correcting congenital defects, bypassing coronary arteries plugged with plaque, to name the principle procedures. All of this done through the patient's (even a baby's) split sternum, and the chest wide open. We were very empathetic about their chest pain complaints postoperatively, mostly by reassuring words, greatly assisted by some morphine at first, then Tylenol No.3,... while offering that, this too would pass.
• Much more recently, some interventions have quietly developed which allow cardiovascular (heart and blood vessel) interventions to be done much less invasively: Imagine that. Imagine dilating a coronary artery blockage with a tiny ballon from inside the artery, and placing a stent (a small "stay open tunnel") placed inside that now dilated artery, ... to keep it open, and blood flowing through. And if the patient complained of some slight discomfort afterwards, perhaps this was due to where the person doing the procedure had absentmindedly leaned a bit too much on the patient's hip and thigh during the procedure. Usually not a very big deal, and a patient ready to go home much more rapidly when compared with before.
• Why mention this? As an example of the evolution, in just 1 doctor's career-time, of a methodology, evolving in the field of cardiovascular interventions, to make a patient better: To relieve suffering, and heal the sick where possible.

Have all disciplines of Medicine, evolved like this: in similar "jumps" and at the same pace?

You guessed right if you thought: "No." So in the discipline that The Challenge would seem closest to scientifically, the answer is a resounding: "No." And less a situation of repeated failures, than to have simply not tried very often to explore this discipline scientifically.

So let's look, related to the SendThemPeace.com mission, at psychology, its sister, psychiatry,  psychical research, and "things of the mind." Here we are moving back towards telepathy and similar subjects introduced above. If psychology interests itself in things "mental," and psychiatry in approaching "mental" abnormalities, and psychical reasearch with things "of the mind," but incomprehensible to the first two, yet supposedly real,... is there a similar evolution and advancement evident over time in this domain, compared with advancement rates in open heart surgery?

The answer for this author, is again a resounding "No." How come?

What follows derives from a review of articles obtained in searching PubMed, the "new" version of Medline, to learn what it informs, using a simple search term of "telepathy."

Since this is not a Congressional Committee hearing, I'll try to be brief as possible, though such a promise risks to leave the reader "informed," but unfortunately also leaving the reader before he/ she has acquired a deep sense of this history, which reveals mostly, a striking lack of evolution. To where has the science of explaining phenomenon not immediately apparent to our senses, evolved? : Where it was, is where it is.

I was struck by journal articles and book reviews from the 19th century, expressing the same conclusions, with the same terminology and sentiment, as many published this year. And in both centuries the same conclusions, to whit: 

• psychical phenomenon remain unexplainable by "modern" (labelled "modern" in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries), psychological or psychiatric science. I.e., "Yes, certain things seem to be going on (like telepathy), but we don't know why or how. Therefore, we remain extremely suspicious and doubting of any actual effect presence, and even more of any cause and effect relationship."
• close inspection of claims to psychical phenomenon or abilities, usually leads to discovery of hoax or charlatanism of the "county fair" variety. That remains as true today as in the past.  Such discoveries are never missed by the opposing camp (i.e., conventional medical disciplines), to serve as yet another proof, that "all this stuff, this psi stuff, is a hoax," or a form of psychopathology, or equivalent conclusion, and leading to an end of dialogue and dismissal.
• our current impressions about "extra-sensory" phenomenon, are still horribly crippled today, by a decision taken centuries ago, to separate psychology and psychiatry from psychic science. This decision, beginning after 1860, has yet to be fully recovered from in almost 2016. This separation can be tacked down to specific times and individuals, engaged in vehement debate and argument. The conclusion was, rather than including psychic phenomenon in the laboratory of mind research, to exclude it forever, so that psychology/ psychiatry could succeed in assuring its dominance and importance as a discipline of equal merit with Internal Medicine or Cardiology to name two "respected" disciplines, for comparison.  Even when psychiatry and psychology were still floundering medical disciplines, searching desperately for clues to cognitive processes, and concepts like the unconscious and understanding it, the incorporation into their disciplines of psychic science, was (and still is), hotly contested and opposed. Perhaps a reaction against moving into the unkown, rather than further into what was barely, known. Result of all this segregation? : No progress. This has spilled over today into, not only a general lack of interest, but a continued and seemingly inescapable tradition of sloppy science, when "psychic science" is approached in any way. A fascinating demonstration of the exclusionary power of scientific bigotry, carved deeply into the formative stones of this discipline, now centuries ago.
• Phenomenon deemed unexplainable scientifically, are usually paired to a call for further research to pursue these "exciting leads." Such pursuit rarely happens. If it does, rather than moving forwards from what was learned before, it tends to start again at proving or disproving a purported "medium," or explaining card-guessing demonstrations. 
• Notice in what follows that terms such as "telepathy," and what that term is taken to mean, have remained the same since, in the examples grouped here, 1898 to the present. Notice also the association of "telepathy" with spiritualism. This assocation will appear, disappear, and re-appear 100 years later.

A few examples of this remarkable non-evolution, with limited summarization: (articles are offered as PDF here for your own download and reading if desired, followed by an excerpt, impression or summary) ...

• 1898 Jan 1 - Review of "Studies in Psychical Research" - "... "MOST books on spiritualism are a weariness to the flesh, and the mixture of unctuous self-righteousness and unreasoning credulity which characterises the majority is particularly nauseous to many minds. We are glad to recognise in Mr.

  PODMORE'S latest volume a striking exception." "... even with the help of a large body of experimental proof the doctrine of telepathy.........still hangs in the balance."

• 1912 - A Study of Psychical Research - "It seems desirable to combat the methods and conclusions of the advocates of telepathy and spiritualism, both in the cause of scientific truth per se and on account of the intellectual, moral, and material harm wlich may and does result from these particular beliefs. It is not necessary, nor will space allow us, to dilate uipon the second of these reasons, especially to medical readers. But the first, perhaps, requires some explication. Much loose tllinking about the evidence for these phenomena seems to prevail among some persons who have much knowledge of certain branches of science, and confidently appeal to scientific method in support of their plea for the further extension of " psychical research."
• 1945 - Telepathy and the Group Mind - "Largely as a result of very careful experiments by such workers as Dr. Rhine and Dr. Soal, telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition have been shown to be fit subjects for scientific research. In the words of Dr. Thouless, "the evidence for the reality of the phenomenon is now so overwhelming that scepticism can only be justified by ignorance of the experimental results." It is not so much that the sceptical feel called on to

  boggle at the results as that they find them impossible to fit into any reasonable theory. ... Most of the worth-while experiments have been of the cardguessing type, in which high proportions of successes have been obtained despite extreme precautions to prevent any normal communication between experimenter and subject. Possible explanations by a " sixth sense " or by " wireless waves " can apparently be excluded. It makes no difference to success

  whether experimenter and subject are separated by the wall of a room or by a range of mountains. He points out that minds which hold a great deal of their sensa and images in common may be especially favourably constituted for telepathic communication. One could suggest, for instance, testing this by having husbands and wives, or, better, uniovular twins, as experimenter and subject. Groups of people who lead very similar lives, such as primitive tribes, would be

  expected to be more liable to telepathy than civilized groups; and in the case of some animals, such as shoals of fish or armies of ants, it would not be surprising if the evidence for a group mind were still stronger. This is an extremely interesting and, though often highly speculative, a thought-provoking book.

• 1954 Medical Book review on telepathy (price 5$!) - (The most striking thing I noticed was the price of this book! Today, any "worthwhile" medical text will certainly have a minimum of one, and up to two zeroes added to this price in 1954!) - "It is difficult to evaluate this book which deals with matters foreign to scientific thinking. Most scientists are tempted to reject all evidence of paranormal phenomena, in spite of the many controlled experiments that have been reported. However, the publication of this book by the Yale University Press, with a sympathetic introduction by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Sterling Professor of Zoology at Yale University, indicates that the study of telepathy has begun to acquire academic status. ... It may be that concern with the mystical is a necessary adjunct to the study of telepathy. This may be because the two subjects are related, or because it is necessary to explore all areas to determine which are susceptible to scientific investigation, or because perhaps the association of the two simply reveals, the kind of person who is presently willing to study telepathy. It is certainly true that the subject is not now attractive to men of outstanding scientific competence and imagination.

        One day it may be. When it is convincingly confirmed that extrasensory processes can perceive events in the present, past, or future, then the most able
  men will be needed to carry on further studies. Enough suggestive data have already been collected to make the subject worthy of serious investigation by
  some of our best scientists.
  In this book the report of paranormal phenomena is fair and seemingly amply confirmed. For people already interested in telepathy and clairvoyance, the
  book will serve as a reference to contemporary ideas and literature on the subject. It may serve a more important purpose. It may encourage cross-fertilization of ideas between students of the paranormal and other disciplines such as psychology or psychiatry. For this reason it is appropriate for this book to be found in a medical library.

• 2012 - Policing epistemic deviance - Notzing and Moll (History) - One must first place this in its correct spot on the timeline. It should actually fall first in the current selection. While written in 2012, this historical analysis and review concerns the end of the 19th century. It begins to show the tendency for "established" (it was anything but that) psycholocgy and psychology in 1888, to wantonly destroy anyone and his/ her science, tied to the psychical domain. The article makes for an excellent factual review of this particular relationship of Notzing and Moll which demonstrates this destruction by representatives of one domain by those of another, with the aim of securing dominance, rather than working towards, as suggested later by William James, "father" of modern psychiatry, incorporating one in the other, even with its apparently incomprehensible components brought along for later research. Here is this article's conclusion: "Stirred by the above observations, the aim of the present historical case study has been to show the historical and current relevance of certain forms of scientific dogmatism as a problem that deserves focused academic attention. For to tolerate its (very real) effects is not only to risk the destruction of careers of potential scientific innovators, it also threatens 

  to undermine basic ideals and requirements for science to maintain and fulfil its role as an intrinsically progressive rather than ideologically regressive project: self-criticism, epistemic pluralism, and intellectual freedom." This warning should still be heeded in our own time, but isn't. In their professional relationship, one quickly finds a conclusion echoed today, that anyone seriously interested by extra-sensory phenomenon (increasingly referred to today as "psi," must have a serious psychologic problem. Today's literature abounds with various explanations for where that problem arises, in which fears, etc. All this to call attention to the observation that the name calling continues unabated, while the scientific investigation and presentation of useful results, advances little from the 19th century, or at a snail's pace. Explaining "unexplained" yet apparently real phenomenon like telepathy, after its careful confirmation as not arising in charlatanism, still yields today, a whole host of divisive arguments and attacks: but few useful or applicable explanations.

• Professional Heresy - Edmund Gurney (1847-88) - another historical work, placed here because of its 2011 publication date. But it concerns the "father" or at least first recognized researcher into psychical phenomena, Edmund Gurney (1847-1888). "Edmund Gurney was the first ‘fulltime’ psychical researcher in history. While he was primarily concerned with empirical evidence for telepathy, Gurney significantly contributed to the late nineteenth-century literature on hallucinations in the sane, and the psychology of hypnotism and dissociation. ... It is argued that although Gurney’s research into hallucinations and hypnotism had been embraced and assimilated by contemporary psychologists such as William James, Alfred Binet and others, his contributions to psychology have subsequently been marginalised because of the discipline’s paradigmatic rejection of controversial research questions his findings were entangled with." So again, an opportunity for a discipline to advance, was missed by its own closed-mindedness. And this at a time where clarity and understanding were still sorely lacking to guide it, and provide it with a solid foundation. Not very scientific behavior in a setting where "scientific method" was used as an argument to defend its position.
• Psychical Research and the Origins of American Psychology - A third important historical work published in 2012, but directed again at the 1890's when certain psychologists recognized as leaders in their field, put a long-lasting divide between thier domain, still seeking dominance, and psychical research. As Andreas Sommer presents in the article: " Largely unacknowledged by historians of the human sciences, late-19th-century psychical researchers were actively involved in the making of fledgling academic psychology. Moreover, with few exceptions historians have failed to discuss the wider implications of the fact that the founder of academic psychology in America, William James, considered himself a psychical researcher and sought to integrate the scientific study of mediumship, telepathy and other controversial topics into the nascent discipline. Analysing the celebrated exposure of the medium Eusapia Palladino by German-born Harvard psychologist Hugo Mu¨nsterberg as a representative example, this article discusses strategies employed by psychologists in the United States to expel psychical research from the agenda of scientific psychology. It is argued that the traditional historiography of psychical

  research, dominated by accounts deeply averse to its very subject matter, has been part of an ongoing form of ‘boundary-work’ to bolster the scientific status of psychology."

• May, 1950 - Psi Phenomena and Psychiatry (JB Rhine at Duke) - "But is there any longer really a question of choice in the matter? Extrasensory perception

  does not appear to follow any physical criteria to which it has been subjected. The advantage of this mental process is that it can be set up against the time-space framework and its relationship to these criteria of the physical world made a matter of actual test and measurement.
  Extrasensory pcrception has succeeded over distances as great as four thousand miles. Comparative experiments at shorter distances have shown quite as good ESP results at one hundred yards, for example, as obtained at one yard distance. Tests made at a distance of two hundred miles and two feet showed no significant difference in results. The work on precognition or ESP of the future, is technical and elaborate. It has not advanced to an extent comparable to the conquest of distance, but the mere establishment of precognition of any kind as a genuine occurrence takes us out of the realm of physical concepts for an explanation of. the phenQmenon concerned. While there is, no doubt, a great deal more to be done, especially in trying greater lengths of time in -further precognition experiments, those who have followed the researches of ESP in time and space have rather unanimously been forced to concede that there seems to be no relationship found -or even suggested withinthe range examined. ... It must be conceded that we do not yet have an explanation for these phenomena. But for what fundamental aspect of mental life do we have an explanation? Perhaps the only point parapsychology need claim to have made is that we are dealing with a subdivision of functions of human personality, some of which defy explanation in terms of those properties and principles that have so effectively explained matter. In an area in which there has been only speculation and blind faith in the past, these findings come as a fresh and compelling

  orientation. They have started our thinking very definitely along lines unhampered by mechanistic dogma. No one can say yet where this evidence of the nonphysical nature of these mental operations will eventually lead, but it should at least liberate the sciences of man from the impasse into which three centuries of over-emphasis on matter have led them." -- an article worth downloading and reading oneself in its entirety, here in May of 1950; from the head of Duke University's Parapsychology Laboratory, finally a hint of a balanced approach to our question. But does it persist into today?

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We are today, the living inheritors of these traditions. Their message clearly and forcefully sent was, and is, and simply put: "Don't believe in all this stuff. It's snake oil. It's charlatanism and circus sideshow stuff." Is it possible that we have in fact unconsciously ingested this teaching, and transformed it into a subconscious belief? And in so doing, have we limited our individual travels, and methods of travel, into a world beyond the one, that fits "appropriately" into psychology and psychiatry's "belief-system" today?  

Where do we find today, the "children" of the turbulent relationship of psychology and psychical science?

Were they ever married? Perhaps one day, but not yet.

Let's place that in an article to follow, since this one has certainly attained a more than sufficient length ...  

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The red region below is the Parahippocampal Gyrus. Ah!... But you knew that.

Perhaps scanning the horizon for the other half of his brain, poor thing.

"Parahippocampal gyrus animation small" by Polygon data were generated by Database Center for Life Science(DBCLS)[2]. - Polygon data are from BodyParts3D[1]. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.1 jp via Wikimedia Commons.

Sure. Crazy. Absolutely.

Like all the people in this car ...

The driver is an Austrian shepherd, Hans Breuer – singing a song in Yiddish.

"What's so special?" you ask. "He doesn't even sing so hot."

What is special is that this Jewish man is the son of parents who fled Nazi Germany before WWII. They became homeless refugees.

His car is filled with Syrian refugees to whom he is giving a ride to help them relocate from a camp in Hungary. Notice also when he sings, how silent everyone is until it's time to join in. Why? Because in that silence, they are being healed by the Spirit of His Song. Imbibing it through every pore. Sound crazy. Sure.

And that's  what's so special.

And, yes, that may take a little craziness. Making you different from those who may look at you strangely, for being not like them.

And where are you driving to? 

Where we have gotten to so far, arises 100% out of our ideas. Unhappy and frightened by our world? Perhaps it's time to change your ideas, and from there, our ideas, our World's ideas.

There's a song waiting quietly in your heart. Let it out. Sing it!

Do like Hans Breuer. Meet The Challenge.

Full story here.

Oh No! And yet here again ... absolute craziness,

... this time evolving out of an initial attack of craziness ... where is our World headed? 

Let's let you decide.  Where do you want to take it?

Need something with a little more of a beat? Try Tom Morley at Instant Teamwork.

Not crazy enough?

OK. Let's bring together some really Crazy People. Certainly quite different from you. Watch with caution.

Sure. Craziness. Tribal Berzerkies. 

And, finally, (or maybe not), here’s some more craziness. Imagine, human beings trying to build a Cathedral in the midst of craziness, then coming together within it, leaving their bias and prejudice at the door. That's Crazy!

What is not Crazy? Well, most would say that if something can be known, counted, categorized and recognized right off the bat as normative ("normal," if you prefer), then it is not Crazy. So The Challenge, not in its written words, but in its application as a practice, with Many becoming One for 20 minutes each day, gets a person into that space where Reality defies being categorized. It's bigger than the box of "knowing," where everything is tacked down. At times the question "how?" has no apparent answer. Can one live with a simple assurance, that an answer is somehow (or some-how) finding itself if we let it. Of course, "not tacked down" is also a realm where surprise and mystery roam unfettered. So be prepared! Participating in The Challenge, might just end up changing your life.

Sound Crazy? But is it crazy enough yet, to get the job done? 

Be crazy enough to accept and meet The Challenge. Pick up the gauntlet today. Be a Peace Warrior.