Back from the Dead
April 05, 2013
“New York researchers are bringing people back to life hours after they pass. And it could change our definition of what ‘dying’ really is.”
From The New York Post. By Maureen Callahan
Early one afternoon in August 2009, Joe Tiralosi, a 57-year-old professional driver in excellent health, began sweating profusely. He wasn’t alarmed, though — it was, after all, summer in New York City. Tiralosi had just pulled out of a car wash and was heading home to Brooklyn, so he cranked up the air conditioning and figured he’d be fine.
One hour later, Tiralosi was so weak that he felt incapable of driving the car one more block. A colleague found Tiralosi slumped in his car at Second Avenue and 80th Street and rushed him to New York-Presbyterian, where Tiralosi collapsed and died. He’d suffered cardiac arrest.
CPR was performed, but after 10 minutes, doctors still couldn’t get a pulse — and 10 minutes has, for decades, been the metric in medicine. A patient who cannot be revived in that time frame has the potential to suffer massive brain damage, but in Tiralosi’s case, doctors kept at it.
After 20 minutes, they still couldn’t get a pulse. At this point, it’s up to the individual doctor whether to keep going. Tiralosi’s did, even after half an hour had passed, after his heart had been shocked six times. In fact, they kept going after 40 minutes — way past what modern medicine considers viable.
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“Death itself we can reverse,” says Dr. Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “We have the scientific means.”
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Less than three weeks later, Joe Tiralosi walked out of the hospital and back to his old life in Brooklyn, to his wife and his job, not a thing wrong with him physically or cognitively. And he is just one of thousands who, in recent years, have been dead for unprecedented lengths of time — two, three, five hours — and brought back to life, healthy and whole.
“Death itself we can reverse,” says Dr. Sam Parnia, director of resuscitation research at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. “We have the scientific means.”
With Josh Young, Parnia has just published an astonishing new book called Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne).
The implications are as revolutionary as the discovery of fire and electricity, the invention of aviation and manned space flight, the A-bomb and the Internet.
“For millennia, we couldn’t do anything when someone stopped breathing,” he says. “Now, we’re almost having to redefine the way we think about death.”
The science is still in its infancy, and successful resuscitation requires two non-negotiables: a treatable underlying cause of death, such as a clogged artery or fluid in the lungs, and a body that has been cooled, either naturally or artificially. It’s the cooling that retards cell death in the body and the brain, protecting against cognitive impairment.
Consciousness and Parapsychology: A Thought Experiment
April 02, 2013
“...in taking inventory of the paranormal potentials of human consciousness, we find grounds for undreamed of possibilities for enhancing life. Our telepathic potencies herald a new order of love based on the natural empathy between sentient beings.”
From IONS, The Noetic Now Journal
By Michael Grosso, PhD
Consciousness is a recent phenomenon in the history of planet Earth; we know nothing of it beyond or prior to terrestrial history. What we do know is part of the story – the unfinished story – of human evolution. The true function of consciousness is quite puzzling, and its relationship to the central nervous system is riddled with hard questions. Some regard consciousness as eluding rational explanation, as does the mysterian philosopher, Colin McGinn, while some like the late psychologist William James contend that consciousness does not exist, at least not in any substantive sense.
As to its causal powers, there is a spectrum of opinions, ranging from epiphenomenalism (consciousness as impotent brain offshoot) to hypophenomenalism (brain as somehow derivative from consciousness). Some say it is an emergent property, the result of a critical measure of brain complexity; others think it something implicit in being or nature, waiting to be teased into manifestation. Some call it a glorious excresence of chance, others see in its purity – God throwing off sparks of soul life. Dostoysevsky thought consciousness was a disease, a freakish pain, an impediment to life.
Obviously, there is no consensus here. This may be a clue to something important, a kind of wink daring us to push boldly onward. I will therefore take up the gauntlet and attempt an evocation of the extraordinary potential of human consciousness. Now the question we are asking is this: What might the world look like – what would it be like? -- if we used human consciousness at full throttle?
...Here I will sketch a model based on psychological data usually avoided if not repressed by mainstream science. My thought-experiment will draw on parapsychology, or psychical research – the study of certain unexplained or “paranormal” phenomena that clearly have dramatic implications for the primacy of consciousness. Since this is an exercise of the hypothetical imagination, we will not review the evidence for the phenomena... Our job is to imagine their implications for human life and ask how they may contain the seeds of human transformation.
Living in a Telepathic World
Parapsychology is an embattled enterprise, generally unwelcomed by mainstream science or religion. True, great names in science and philosophy may be invoked who were sympathetic to the cause...but the majority of mainstream scientists keep their distance. With few exceptions, theologians are aloof, whereas religious fundamentalists tend to be hostile and somewhat paranoid about the claims of parapsychology. The latter often identify psychic phenomena as probably of diabolic origin.
...What then are the implications for human function of paranormal phenomena?... Telepathy, if it exists, names a huge extension of human consciousness (and indeed subconsciousness); in human relations it enables us to transcend the limits of sense life, suggesting that the boundaries separating our personalities may be more porous than we think.
...Suppose that some psychoactive agent, inner discipline, or genetic mutation raised the level of telepathic performance to a general human capacity. Of course, some might recoil from too much openness and transparency. On the positive side, the greater the mutual openness and transparency, the more likely that intimacy, empathy, and sympathy would emerge; it would be hard, for example, to witness the sufferings of others with indifference and detachment. Telepathy might also help us penetrate the interior worlds of nonhumans, thus intuitively supporting the notion of animal liberation. It would be more natural to acknowledge that nonhumans suffer as well as experience pleasure, and we would more readily share their pathos and enjoyments.
...Frederic Myers saw a link between love and telepathy. “Love,” he wrote, “is a kind of exalted and unspecialized telepathy.” It would be hard to ignore the misery of the other just as I find it hard to ignore the misery inflicted on me, my friends, or my loved ones. Compassionate social activism would cease being a rarity but become part of our normal response to the world. Generosity of spirit would be commonplace, not exceptional, and love a byproduct of the ordinary pathos of perception. Greed and other vicious psychic dispositions would shrivel in direct proportion to the new scope of pathos consciousness. Thus, in the flitting epiphanies of what today we call telepathy, we may be seeing signs of a new order of love.
Clairvoyance and Genius
Let us now ask what would happen if our clairvoyant capacity were dramatically enlarged. Genius, Myers thought, represented the true normality of future humanity: a state in which the waking self is in continuous vital relationship with the subliminal self. That deepened interaction is what he meant by genius. Clairvoyance implies a supernormal consciousness of distant scenes, objects, and, in Myers’ usage, planes, modes, as well as symbols of existence. As Myers linked love with telepathy, he linked genius with clairvoyance. Among other things, genius for Myers implied clairvoyant access to the subliminal mind, which in its totality contains the repository of world history, world-soul, and whatever timeless wisdom and inspiration is available to the mind of man.
...With telepathy and clairvoyance enhanced, the quality of human relationships and the range of creativity would be powerfully enhanced.
An Enlarged Sense of Time
Paranormal investigation further suggests that our consciousness of time is latently more flexible and certainly more puzzling than commonly supposed...Psychical researchers flummox us with reports of precognition and retrocognition; people occasionally seem to catch unmediated glimpses of past and future. Glimpses of the future especially raise questions about our conventional ideas of time. The obvious objection is that true precognition would reverse the customary causal sequence, creating the awkward idea of backward causation. But more to the point: What concrete life-difference would it make if we could expand our consciousness of time?
...What would it be like if we could experience the full presence of the present; in short, see ourselves more clearly, the impact of our words and deeds on the world around us, all the effects radiating outwardly?...What we mostly know in normal consciousness is the restless, scurrying picture of things under the shadow of the clock racing; if we could widen our consciousness sufficiently, we might learn something about “eternity,” – the “world” in Blake’s “grain of sand.” The eyelids of eternal vision flicker; we are enfolded in something greater than piecemeal time....
We find flickers of enlarged time sense in the anomalies of memory: reports of children who remember past lives and of people who nearly die and see “panoramic” visions of their whole lives before them. Surely we would dramatically change if we learned to see in one glance the pattern of our life, its shape and direction and dominant motifs.
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Finally, we will learn to experience the timeless core of our consciousness.
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Mind over Matter
So far we’ve looked at some possibilities of perceptual transformation. There is also the question of bodily transformation. ESP is receptive, but PK or psychokinesis is expressive, intentional, directed. Here consciousness performs what must seem like a miracle to our mainstream materialists: it seems to leap beyond its physical integument and exert influence on states of matter...An example are the famous dice-throwing experiments of J.B. Rhine, in which subjects “will” a particular die face to come out. Consciousness here expresses itself by directly transforming states of physical reality....
However, conscious volition is only one way that consciousness may express itself psychokinetically. There may be involuntary forms of psychic influence on living bodies or physical objects, for example, as in the metaphysically charged antics of poltergeists. Here, a living agent, often a youngster undergoing emotional turmoil, involuntarily causes objects to move, break, or otherwise behave anomalously. Sometimes the poltergeist agent learns to control the initially involuntary effects. The implications of this could be seen as frightening. These and other documentable cases suggest we may one day learn consciously to direct the matter-molding powers of the subliminal psyche. If and when that time comes, a new stage of the human adventure will have been launched.
Extreme forms of psychokinesis tell us something else about the powers of the human mind. In a few cases, evidence for levitation is very strong...Another example are the stigmata produced by saints known to have been focusing their attention on paintings or statues of the crucified Christ. Finally, there are cases of inedia, where a saintly individual lives without eating or drinking for months or even years.... We can call this “psychokinesis by symbolic action.”
These examples (there are other well-documented cases) illustrate the potential of consciousness to directly influence physical reality...All these suggest the power of mind for enhancing or of course damaging health and life itself.
The Illusion of Death
One final conception of our thought-experiment compels us to contemplate the following: the psychokinetic powers of saints, yogis, physical mediums, and aboriginal “people of high degree” suggest the possibility of some kind of afterlife body and afterlife environment. Ecstasy or anxiety, love or enmity, may shape the kinds of mental body and environment – in traditional terms, hellish or heavenly – we are said to experience in the postmortem world.
The early psychical researchers sought to determine if there were empirical grounds for the belief in a life after death. So far, well over a hundred years of research have harvested much interesting (and various sorts of) data suggesting that we may (at least some of us for some time) survive bodily death. Now suppose survival was a fact of nature. What difference would it make? That of course will vary from individual to individual, but a few remarks might stimulate some thinking.
...We need to imagine a better use of a 21st-century science-based afterlife mythology.... For example, if we saw our passage to the next world as one of ever-deepening self-revelation, a kind of sudden and imposed openness and transparency, as a scene where the unconscious becomes conscious and the inner becomes the outer, I would think we might feel motivated to better know ourselves in preparation for what is to come. All experience here on earth would be charged with new significance, for we would know we are creating the future – planting seeds for unpredictable growths in possibly unknown environments. The idea of another round of existence on another plane of existence would force us to revise our attitude toward life – if, that is, we viscerally believed it. Whatever we did and whatever we thought would gain an intensity of meaning would become part of the myth of each of our personal world-lines as they drive and cut their tangled way through the jungle of space and time.
Consciousness is often said to be intentional; it is always about something. It always points to a world of one or another type or dimension. Consciousness, in short, is always a transparency, an opening. Now, its power to extend to a “next” world is also the power that can open us to this world. Here, in my opinion, is the greatest gift of consciousness; its freedom to choose, select, emphasize, reject, affirm, praise, and love. It is this power to highlight what is essential, what is vitally important to any world, that is the greatest thing about consciousness. It is our mental culture, the inner equipment deployed to interpret and transform experience.
The prospect of death concentrates the mind, Samuel Johnson once said; the prospect of an afterlife would concentrate our minds no less. For if this strange story, this uncanny adventure, goes on even after the body is reduced to lifeless atoms, then we have to be incredibly alert and totally alive to the dangers and wondrous possibilities that await us along the way. Add the provocative evidence of psychical research, and we are entitled to imagine continuous adventure as definitive of the human condition.
At Liberation’s Door
To sum up, in taking inventory of the paranormal potentials of human consciousness, we find grounds for undreamed of possibilities for enhancing life. Our telepathic potencies herald a new order of love based on the natural empathy between sentient beings. The unfolding of clairvoyant capacity points to a new democracy of genius, to deeper access to the many layers of self, and rapport with the natural world. Our enlarged consciousness of time will enrich the quality-of-life experience, adding depth, perspective, and complexity. The unfolding of our psychokinetic potential foreshadows radical changes in the manner of our embodiment on Earth. Emancipation from physical constraints will free us for the supreme pursuits of our lives as each of us sees them. Finally, we will learn to experience the timeless core of our consciousness. The old terror of death will be lifted – an albatross from our backs – and we will become citizens of the evolving universe, free to enjoy the gift and adventure of life.
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About the Author: Dr. Michael Grosso received his philosophy doctorate from Columbia University. He is presently with the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia and an editor for the journal Philosophical Practice, published by the American Philosophical Practitioner’s Association (APPA). He is the author of Experiencing the Next World Now (Pocket Books/Simon & Shuster, 2004).
Effects of meditation training on emotional processing might transfer to non-meditative states
March 31, 2013
“...meditation training may induce learning that is not stimulus- or task-specific, but process-specific, and thereby may result in enduring changes in mental function.”
From Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, "Effects of mindful-attention and compassion meditation training on amygdala response to emotional stimuli in an ordinary, non-meditative state."
By Gaëlle Desbordes, Lobsang T. Negi, Thaddeus W. W. Pace, B. Alan Wallace, Charles L. Raison and Eric L. Schwartz
The amygdala has been repeatedly implicated in emotional processing of both positive and negative-valence stimuli. Previous studies suggest that the amygdala response to emotional stimuli is lower when the subject is in a meditative state of mindful-attention, both in beginner meditators after an 8-week meditation intervention and in expert meditators. However, the longitudinal effects of meditation training on amygdala responses have not been reported when participants are in an ordinary, non-meditative state. In this study, we investigated how 8 weeks of training in meditation affects amygdala responses to emotional stimuli in subjects when in a non-meditative state. Healthy adults with no prior meditation experience took part in 8 weeks of either Mindful Attention Training (MAT), Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT; a program based on Tibetan Buddhist compassion meditation practices), or an active control intervention. Before and after the intervention, participants underwent an fMRI experiment during which they were presented images with positive, negative, and neutral emotional valences from the IAPS database while remaining in an ordinary, non-meditative state. Using a region-of-interest analysis, we found a longitudinal decrease in right amygdala activation in the Mindful Attention group in response to positive images, and in response to images of all valences overall. In the CBCT group, we found a trend increase in right amygdala response to negative images, which was significantly correlated with a decrease in depression score. No effects or trends were observed in the control group. This finding suggests that the effects of meditation training on emotional processing might transfer to non-meditative states. This is consistent with the hypothesis that meditation training may induce learning that is not stimulus- or task-specific, but process-specific, and thereby may result in enduring changes in mental function.
Temporary tattoos could make electronic telepathy and telekinesis possible
March 26, 2013
“...there is a need for noninvasive technologies such as these for the brain. ‘People will want to navigate environments just by thinking, or play games just by thinking,’....”
From Txchnologist.com. By Charles Q. Choi
Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say.
Commanding machines using the brain is no longer the stuff of science fiction. In recent years, brain implants have enabled people to control robotics using only their minds, raising the prospect that one day patients could overcome disabilities using bionic limbs or mechanical exoskeletons.
But brain implants are invasive technologies, probably of use only to people in medical need of them. Instead, electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.
His team is developing wireless flexible electronics one can apply on the forehead just like temporary tattoos to read brain activity.
“We want something we can use in the coffee shop to have fun,” Coleman says.
The devices are less than 100 microns thick, the average diameter of a human hair. They consist of circuitry embedded in a layer or rubbery polyester that allow them to stretch, bend and wrinkle. They are barely visible when placed on skin, making them easy to conceal from others.
The devices can detect electrical signals linked with brain waves, and incorporate solar cells for power and antennas that allow them to communicate wirelessly or receive energy. Other elements can be added as well, like thermal sensors to monitor skin temperature and light detectors to analyze blood oxygen levels.
Using the electronic tattoos, Coleman and his colleagues have found they can detect brain signals reflective of mental states, such as recognition of familiar images. One application they are now pursuing is monitoring premature babies to detect the onset of seizures that can lead to epilepsy or brain development problems. The devices are now being commercialized for use as consumer, digital health, medical device, and industrial and defense products by startup MC10 in Cambridge, Mass.
Electronic telekinesis? Digital telepathy?
In past studies, Coleman’s team found that volunteers could use caps studded with electrodes to remotely control airplanes and flew an unmanned aerial vehicle over cornfields in Illinois. Although the electronic tattoos currently cannot be used to pilot planes, “we’re actively working on that,” Coleman says.
These devices can also be put on other parts of the body, such as the throat. When people think about talking, their throat muscles move even if they do not speak, a phenomenon known as subvocalization. Electronic tattoos placed on the throat could therefore behave as subvocal microphones through which people could communicate silently and wirelessly.
“We’ve demonstrated our sensors can pick up the electrical signals of muscle movements in the throat so that people can communicate just with thought,” Coleman says. Electronic tattoos placed over the throat could also pick up signals that would help smartphones with speech recognition, he added.
Invasive brain implants remain better at reading brain activity, Coleman notes.
But neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center says there is a need for noninvasive technologies such as these for the brain. “People will want to navigate environments just by thinking, or play games just by thinking,” says Nicolelis, who did not take part in this research.
Coleman detailed his group’s most recent findings in Boston on Feb. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Image credit: The Neural Interaction Lab led by UC San Diego bioengineering professor Todd Coleman is working with Ricardo Gil da Costa, PhD, at the Salk Institute to examine the use of wearable flexible electronics on the forehead to monitor congnitive impairment with systems that are minimally obtrusive. These patches of sensors monitor electrical rhythms of the brain and can wirelessly transmit information optically (via LEDs) or electromagnetically (via flexible antennas) to provide quantitative measures of attentional modulation that co-vary with the progression of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and schizophrenia. These minimally obtrusive wearable electronics provide promise for future clinical brain monitoring applications for hospitals and laboratories, outpatient clinics or even at home. Image courtesy Todd Coleman/UCSD.
Time Travel Communication: Sending Messages Through Time Can Be Possible
March 24, 2013
“Time is a dimension, but it's so unsual in that sense that we can only move forward in it as long as we are in our Universe.”
From MessageToEagle.com:
Is time travel possible? Can we send messages back in time? Can we talk to our future selves? These are questions that have been widely debated among scientists for a very long time.
"Time is a dimension, but it's so unsual in that sense that we can only move forward in it as long as we are in our Universe. We try to find ways to travel back in time, but by doing that we are affecting a very important part of our physical Universe, called causality. If we want to travel back in time, we must find a way to prevent causality from being violated," astrophysicist Charles Liu explained.
...Instead of thinking about transporting ourselves back in time , or to the future, we can ponder another more realistic subject - namely time travel communication.
Dr. John Cramer, professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington thinks we must think about time travel in baby steps.
One possibility is to start with messages traveling through time.
Dr. Cramer is currently working on the possibility receiving a message milliseconds before it's sent.
He is conducting his research in the basement at the University and with help of laser beams he might be able to prove what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". He's splitting photons through a series of synthetic crystals to demonstrate that quantum non-locality can be used to communicate.
"I have to admit, this is pushing the envelope and often the envelop pushes back," says Cramer, a nuclear physicist who has worked on projects involving the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
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"I'm a little scared of what happens if it does happen because the implications are so bizarre."
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For those of us who never took high school physics, this is what he's trying to do in layman's terms: If you took a pair of photons created at the same time and altered one of those photons, in theory the other photon would be altered instantly -- even if it was separated by an entire galaxy.
That would mean communication could travel faster than the speed of light over long distances. The ramifications of something Einstein didn't think was possible but theoretically could happen would be incredible. Physicists call it "nonlocal quantum communication."
"You could do real-time communication with objects on other plants," says Cramer. "You could put on a virtual reality helmet and be driving your remote dune buggy on Mars."
In other words, this would give the world's space agencies the possibility to communicate with their spacecraft in real-time.
Unfortunately, Dr. Cramer is struggling with not only technical, but also financial problems. Funding of his project is a difficult matter.
"You have to be able to efficiently detect the entangled photons before you can do any real measurements and we have not been able to do that yet," says Cramer.
According to "the original string theory, bosonic string theory, contained a massless particle called the tachyon, which travels faster than the speed of light. These particles are usually a sign that a theory has an inherent flaw - but what if they actually existed? Would they allow a means of time travel?
The short answer is that no one knows. The presence of tachyons in a theory means that things begin to go haywire, which is why they're considered by physicists to be a sign of fundamental instabilities in the theory. (These instabilities in string theory were fixed by including supersymmetry, creating superstring theory.)
However, just because tachyons mess up the mathematics that physicists use doesn't necessarily mean that they don't exist. It may be possible that physicists just haven't developed the proper mathematical tools to address them in a way that makes sense.
If tachyons do exist, then in theory it would be possible to send messages that travel faster than the speed of light. These particles could actually travel backward in time and, in principle, be detected.
To avoid this problem (because, remember, time travel can destroy all of physics!), the physicist Gerald Feinberg presented the Feinberg reinterpretation principle in 1967, which says that a tachyon traveling back in time can be reinterpreted, under quantum field theory, as a tachyon moving forward in time.
In other words, detecting tachyons is the same as emitting tachyons. There's just no way to tell the difference, which would make sending and receiving messages fairly challenging," Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins write in their book String Theory for Dummies.
If Cramer can prove step one, step two becomes even more fascinating.
"If you can communicate using non-locality then you can communicate faster than light and backwards in time," says Cramer.
"I'm a little scared of what happens if it does happen because the implications are so bizarre."
Psi Phenomena vs. Conventional Wisdom
March 19, 2013
“Metaphysically speaking, Clive’s statement that ‘There is but one life’ is absolutely true - but not quite in the sense in which he means it.”
Certainly there is room for vastly divergent opinion in the world. From TMI's perspective one of the most stimulating debates is between the conventional and the frontier sciences. A couple of recent letters published in the Cyprus Mail represent the "frontier" side of the debate with particular lucidity. Canadian ex-pat John Knowles writes from his home in Pegeia, Paphos, Cyprus. John, along with his wife Linda Leblanc, are long-standing members of The Monroe Institute Professional Division and facilitators of human consciousness exploration.
In the interest of brevity we include here only John’s responses, but you may see the cited article by Clive Turner here: There is but one life and we should make the most of it, by Clive Turner
From the Letters page of the CyprusMail.com, "The sun does not rise and set independently either". By John Knowles.
I never saw Clive Turner’s letter as it appeared (Sunday Mail 17 February.), as I was in Virginia to attend a meeting of the Professional Division of The Monroe Institute, famous for the Out-of-Body experience. The Professional Division largely consists of people with advanced degrees. Our 60-odd attendees from 9 countries included 11 Ph.Ds (many in Physics), 7 MDs and numerous MAs and MScs. These are serious researchers, not gullible fools.
With respect, I suggest that while Clive’s proclamation that “There is but one life and we should make the most of it” reflects strongly his personal prejudice, it completely fails to address the issues raised in my letter headed “Conventional scientists never stop to ask themselves what they really know” (Cyprus Mail 9 February). For one, he far too easily dismisses OBEs and NDEs as due to “rogue electrical manifestations in the brain”, an opinion no longer as widely held by neuroscientists as it once was.
Clive asserts that “countless millions” share his belief. Aside from the fact that numbers are irrelevant (millions once believed the earth to be flat, and even today billions naively assume that the sun independently rises and sets every day), he fails to note that other “countless millions” do accept reincarnation.
He ignores the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, whose 2600 cases fully-documented in accord with the strictest scientific protocols and very convincing Reincarnation and Biology medical monograph, as well as Jenny Cockell’s remarkable story. I can only say to Clive what I said to Dr. Dickenson: read the literature!
As for Clive’s airy condemnation of Extra-Sensory Perception, I suggest that he read “Mind Trek”, or other books by my very close friend, former US Army Chief Warrant Officer Joseph McMoneagle. Joe was Remote Viewer 001 in the US Army’s Stargate Program, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. He was decorated with the Legion of Merit for his “remote viewing” ability to “see” events and gain information from far away in space (and time!). Although the 20-year, $20 million Stargate program ended in 1995, following the end of the Cold War, most of Joe’s “psychic spy” work is still classified.
As for Clive’s comments on magic, no one questions that suitably-equipped magicians can simulate many if not most ESP phenomena, but that proves nothing. The fact that people can now fly in airplanes does not mean that there is no such thing as a bird! Moreover, serious ESP researchers ignore those phony “prize” offers by deniers. On investigation, these always prove to be so hedged about with craftily contrived conditions as to make it virtually impossible ever to win them. The deniers then proudly announce that “the prize has yet to be claimed”!
Metaphysically speaking, Clive’s statement that “There is but one life” is absolutely true - but not quite in the sense in which he means it.
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