Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch,  "The Parapsychology Revolution: The Extraordinary Progress of the “Elusive Science" Quest 111:1, pg 18-27

 By Mitch Horowitz

I believe that our culture is poised for an epochal change in how we understand and accept the core findings of parapsychology—that is, acceptance of the empiricism of the extraphysical. Rejectionism tends to harden on the brink of seismic change, and we are seeing pockets of that as well. But the outcome of the present moment is, I believe, the acknowledgment that we possess indelible evidence of an extraphysical component to life.

The formal scientific scrutiny of anomalous phenomena marked its starting point in 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was founded in London by scientists including F.W.H. Myers (who coined the term telepathy for mind-to-mind communication) and pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James.

At its inception, parapsychology sought to test mediumistic phenomena under controlled conditions. The early SPR worked with rigor to hold spirit mediums to proof. Researchers such as the strong-willed Hodgson and  James himself ventured to the séance table intent on safeguarding against fraud and documenting claimed phenomena, including physical mediumship, after-death communication, and clairvoyance or what is today called channeling. They probed unexplained cases, exposed frauds, and created historical controversies that have lingered until today. But they were working largely within the lace-curtained settings of Victorian parlors. On the whole, SPR researchers were not functioning in clinical environments, so-called white coat lab settings. The American chapter of the SPR, meanwhile, was stymied by factional disputes between members more interested in the after-death survival thesis and those committed to the more conservative direction of documenting mental phenomena.

I do not intend to leave the impression that lab-based study of psychical phenomena was absent. In the 1880s, Nobel laureate and SPR president Charles Richet, one of France’s most highly regarded biologists, studied telepathy with subjects under hypnosis. Richet also introduced the use of statistical analysis in ESP card tests, presaging today’s near-universal use of statistics throughout the psychological and social sciences. In the early 1920s, French engineer René Warcollier conducted a series of experiments on long-distance telepathy. Sigmund Freud himself pondered the possibilities of telepathy, sometimes delaying publication of key statements posthumously to avoid professional fallout. This was the case with Freud’s “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy,” his earliest paper on the topic written in 1921—but withheld from publication until 1941, two years after his death. (This was likely at the urging of his English biographer Ernest Jones, who found the topic professionally compromising.)

The paranormal burgeoned into an acknowledged, if hotly debated, academic field thanks largely to ESP researcher J.B. Rhine (1895‒1980) and his wife and intellectual partner Louisa Rhine (1891‒1983). In the late 1920s and early ’30s, the Rhines established the research program that became the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, which made paradigmatic advances in the scientific study of ESP.

The Rhines trained as statisticians and botanists at the University of Chicago, where both received doctorates (a considerable rarity for a woman then). In Chicago in 1922, they were inspired by a talk on Spiritualism by English author Arthur Conan Doyle. With his eyes on greater horizons, J.B. soon grew restless in his chosen career. “It would be unpardonable for the scientific world today to overlook evidences of the supernormal in our world,” he told what must have been a mildly surprised audience of scientific agriculturalists at the University of West Virginia.

The Rhines began casting around, venturing to Columbia University and Harvard seeking opportunities to combine their scientific training with their metaphysical interests. Initial progress proved fitful. As often occurs in life, just before they gave up their immense efforts, an extraordinary opportunity appeared. In 1930, with the support of Duke’s first president, William Preston Few, the new chairman of Duke’s psychology department, William McDougall, made J.B. Rhine a formal part of the campus.

Although the founding of Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory is often dated to that year, the program was not christened the Parapsychology Laboratory until 1935, where it remained until 1965. Today the Rhine Research Center continues as an independent lab off campus. It proved a watershed episode in which parapsychology was formally folded into an academic structure and study of the psychical became a profession.   

At Duke, J.B. Rhine did not quite originate but popularized the phrase extrasensory perception, or ESP, which soon became a household term. The work begun at Duke’s Parapsychology Lab in the early 1930s has continued among different researchers, labs, and universities to the present day. The effort is to provide impeccably documented evidence that human beings participate in some form of existence that exceeds cognition, motor skill, and commonly observed biological functions—that we participate in trackable, replicable patterns of extra-physicality that permit us, at least sometimes, to communicate and receive information in a manner that surpasses generally acknowledged sensory experience and means of data conveyance. This field of exchange occurs independently of time, space, or mass. 

We have also accumulated a body of statistical evidence for psychokinesis (i.e., mind over matter) and precognition or what is sometimes called retrocausality, in which events in the future affect the present. For several years, Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Northern California, has performed and replicated experiments in precognition in which subjects display bodily stressors, such as pupil dilation or increased heart rate, seconds before being shown distressing or emotionally triggering imagery.

These are fleeting references to a handful of recent findings from modern parapsychology. I am going to make a statement, and I am then going to argue for it: we possess heavily scrutinized, replicable statistical evidence for an extraphysical component of the human psyche. For decades, this evidence has appeared in—and been reproduced for—traditional, academically based journals, often juried by scientists without sympathy for its findings. This evidence has been procured and replicated under rigorous clinical conditions. It demonstrates that the individual possesses or participates in a facet of existence that surpasses what is known to us biologically, psychologically, sensorily, and technologically. In short: ESP exists.

The search for greater dimensions of life is as old as humanity itself. But what is new and revolutionary is the advent of science as a method of protocols to identify processes that affirm primordial humanity’s basic instinct for the extraphysical. As noted, this places our generation before a remarkable precipice. It is one that we have not yet been able to cross.

The precipice is the philosophy called materialism, by which Western life has organized itself for nearly 300 years. Philosophical materialism holds that matter creates itself, and that your mind is strictly an epiphenomenon of your brain. Furthermore, thoughts are a localized function of gray matter which, like bubbles in a glass of carbonated water, are gone once the water is gone. And that is the extent of the psyche.

That philosophy is obsolete. Firstly, an enormous amount of data has amassed verifying both the perceptual basis of reality and the extraphysical—gathered through the same methodology that materialism purports to defend. Secondly, we face the progressing realization that materialism is simply a position, a theory, an ideology, of which science is independent.

This does not mean that materialism will fade gently. Its outlook—that matter evinces no calculable reality beyond classical mechanics and that all contrary evidence or implications are false because they contradict its founding premise—will retain influence for decades. The materialist perspective is concretized within key parts of our culture and media. Many opinion-shaping personalities hold to it with conviction.

What evidence exists for my claims of science affirming the infinite? Here I return to Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory in the early 1930s. Rhine’s innovation as a researcher was developing clear, repeatable, and unimpeachable methods, with rigor and without drama or speculation, for testing and statistically mapping evidence for anomalous communication and conveyance. To attempt this, Rhine initially created a series of card-guessing tests that involved a deck called Zener cards designed by psychologist Karl E. Zener. Zener cards are a five-suit deck, generally with twenty-five cards in a pack, with symbols that are easily and immediately recognizable: circle, square, cross, wavy lines, and five-pointed star. After a deck is shuffled, subjects are asked to attempt blind hits on what symbol will turn up.

Probability dictates that if you are operating from random chance over large spreads, you are going to hit 20 percent, or one out of five. But Rhine discovered, across tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of rigorously safeguarded trials (by 1940, the database included nearly a million trials) that certain individuals, rather than scoring 20 percent, would score 25 percent, 26 percent, 27 percent, sometimes 28 percent (and in select cases a great deal higher).

At the time, social scientists commonly withheld negative sets of data on the questionable grounds that something was flawed with the methodology. Rhine reversed this practice early on at his lab and helped lead the overall social sciences to do so. All of the data were reported. Nothing was withheld in the file drawer. No negative sets were excluded.

In Rhine’s work, every precaution was taken against corruption, withholding, or pollution of data, which was also opened to other researchers (and non-research-based critics) for replication, vetting, and review. In a letter of March 15, 1960, to mathematician and foundation executive Warren Weaver, Rhine spoke of the extra lengths to which the parapsychologist ought to go: “Even though the methodology and standards of evidence may compare favorably with other advances of natural science, they have to be superior in parapsychology because of its novelty; and conceivably, too, by making them still better, everything may be gained in overcoming the natural resistance involved.”

The “natural resistance” or partisanship around such findings can be so intense—and sometimes purposefully obfuscating—that lay seekers may come away with the mistaken impression that Rhine’s work, or that of more recent parapsychologists, has proven unrepeatable or compromised.

The parapsychologist Charles Honorton (1946‒92) sought to analyze critical challenges to Rhine’s figures in the years following their publication. He found that “61 percent of the independent replications of the Duke work were statistically significant. This is 60 times the proportion of significant studies we would expect if the significant results were due to chance or error.”

Rhine’s experiments have proven so bulletproof that even close to fifty years later, his most resistant critics were still attempting to explain them by fantastical (and often feckless) fraud theories, including a prominent English skeptic’s nearly vaudevillian supposition that one of the test subjects repeatedly crawled through a ceiling space to peek at cards through a trapdoor over the lab. At such excesses, rationalists fail the test that Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1772) set for validation of miracles: counterclaims must be less likely than reported phenomena. In any case, Rhine’s methods and results have never been upended.

For all that, Rhine may have proved too idealistic regarding what it took to overcome “natural resistance.” Mainstream media sources engage in pushback and even disingenuousness against data from parapsychology. A prime example appears in how polemical skeptics today ride herd over articles on parapsychology on the most-read reference source in history, Wikipedia. As of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on Zener cards states in its opening, “The original series of experiments have been discredited and replication has proven elusive.” This statement is unsourced, something that would get red-flagged on most of the encyclopedia’s articles.

How does this occur on the world’s go-to reference source? Dean Radin of IONS, described to me the problem of an ad hoc group calling itself “Guerilla Skeptics” policing Wiki entries on parapsychology: “While there are lots of anonymous trolls that have worked hard to trash any Wikipedia pages related to psi, including bios of parapsychologists, this group of extreme skeptics is proudly open that they are rewriting history . . . any attempt to edit those pages, even fixing individual words, is blocked or reverted almost instantly.”

Even if parapsychology as a field had ended with Rhine’s initial Duke trials, we would possess evidence of paranormal mechanics in human existence. Those basic (though painstakingly structured) card experiments, those few percentage points of deviation tracked across tens of thousands of trials (90,000 in the database by the 1934 publication of Extra-Sensory Perception), demonstrate an anomalous transfer of information in a laboratory setting and an extraphysical (call it metaphysical), non-Newtonian exchange of information. 

But things did not end there. In the decades ahead, extraordinary waves of diversified experiments occurred in the U.S. and other nations growing from the efforts of the scientists at Duke’s Parapsychology Laboratory. These efforts demonstrated, again and again, anomalous mental phenomena, including precognition, retrocausality, telepathy, and psychokinesis (PK). Rhine’s lab began studying PK in 1934, an effort that continued until 1941, after which many lab members were summoned to the war effort. During their nine years of investigation, researchers conducted tens of thousands of runs in which individuals would attempt to affect throws of random sets of dice. Devices were soon employed to toss the dice in such a way that ensured randomness, which ought to demonstrate no pattern whatsoever. Again, similar statistical results to the Zener card experiments appeared: among certain individuals, across hundreds of thousands of throws, with every conceivable safeguard, peer review, methodological transparency, and reportage of every set, there appeared a deviation of several percentage points, suggesting a physical effect arising from mental intention.

We have now logged generations of experiments designed to test the effects to which I am referring. Today’s parapsychologists believe, I think with justification, that the basic, foundational science for psychical ability has already been laid. Although parapsychology remains controversial, the field has already moved on from basic testing for ESP, a matter that was more or less settled in the 1940s. 

Recent researchers are concerned with questions including telepathy (mind to mind communication); precognition (the ability to foresee or be affected by things that, within our model of the mind, have not yet occurred); retrocausality (the effect of future events on current perceptions or abilities); a biological basis for psi (including biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic field theories); spontaneous psi events, such as premonitions or crisis realizations; dream telepathy; a “global consciousness” effect during periods of mass emotional reaction; and the practice of remote viewing or clairvoyance. The field also investigates other important areas, including out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, deathbed visions, after-death survival, and reincarnation.

The scientific study of reincarnation was pioneered as an academic field by the remarkable research psychiatrist Ian Stevenson (1918‒2007), who founded the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. For five decades, this conservative researcher “traveled six continents, accumulating more than 2,500 cases of young children who recounted details of previous lives, which he meticulously verified with witnesses, hospital records, autopsy reports, death certificates, and photographs,” eulogized the Journal of Near-Death Studies in Spring 2007.

One of the most important figures in psychical research died of heart failure in 1992 at the tragically young age of forty-six. I mentioned him earlier: his name is Charles Honorton. Honorton’s passing was a tremendous loss for the field, nearly equivalent to losing Einstein at the dawn of his relativity theories.

It is critical to understand what Honorton accomplished. In the late 1960s and ’70s, he engaged in direct research into dreams and ESP at the innovative Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. Honorton proceeded to assemble possibly the most significant body of data we possess in the parapsychology field. It was through a long-running series of experiments designed with colleagues in the 1970s and ’80s known as ganzfeld experiments. Ganzfeld is German for whole or open field. Honorton had an instinct for the conditions under which ESP or telepathy—mind-to-mind communication—might be heightened, which formed the basis of his studies.

Honorton noted that the classic Rhine experiments were largely focused on subjects believed to have a predilection for ESP. Rhine believed that ESP may be detectable throughout the human population but was readily testable through figures who possess innate abilities. He did not consider ESP something for which you could train or that was necessarily intrinsic to everyone. Rather, he focused on what he considered naturally gifted individuals, who made prime subjects.

Honorton took a different tack. He wondered whether psychical abilities are, in fact, general throughout the population—but perhaps the psychical signal, so to speak, gets jammed or the psyche’s circuitry gets overloaded due to excessive stimuli in daily life.

Honorton pondered what it might reveal to test for ESP among subjects who are placed into conditions of relaxed, comfortable sensory deprivation. He ventured that you may be able to spike the ESP effect if you place a subject into sensory-deprived conditions without noise or bright light—for example, seating the person in a comfortable recliner in a noiseproof, dimly lit room or chamber, fitted with eyeshades, and wearing headphones that emit white noise. These conditions induce the state called hypnagogia, a kind of waking hypnosis.

In fact, you enter into the hypnagogic state twice daily: just before you drift to sleep at night and just as you are coming to in the morning. It is a deeply relaxed, motionless state in which you might experience hallucinatory or morphing images, aural hallucinations, tactile sensations of weightlessness, or even bodily paralysis. Yet you remain functionally awake: you are self-aware and able to direct cognition. The morning state is sometimes called hypnopompia (a term coined by psi research pioneer F.W.H. Myers). Hypnagogia and hypnopompia are similar with some differences; for example, hallucinations occur somewhat more commonly during the nighttime state.

Since this state is an apparently inviting period for self-suggestion—the mind is supple, the body relaxed, and the psyche unclouded by stimuli—Honorton pondered whether these conditions might facilitate heightened psychical activity. To test for telepathy, he placed one subject—called the receiver—into the relaxed conditions of sensory deprivation I have described, while a second subject—called the sender—is seated outside the sensory deprivation tank or in another space. In the classical ganzfeld experiments, the sender attempts to “transmit” a preselected image to the receiver. After the sending period ends, the receiver then chooses among four different images (one target image and three decoys) to identify what was sent.

Like the Zener cards, there is a randomly selected target on each successive trial and, in this case, a one in four or 25 percent chance of guessing right. In meta-analyzed data, subjects on average surpassed the 25 percent guess rate. Depending on the analytic model, the most stringently produced experiments demonstrated an overall hit rate of between 32 percent and 35 percent. Since the mid-1970s, this data has, in varying forms, been replicated by dozens of scientists across different labs in different nations, often under increasingly refined conditions. The ganzfeld experiments not only documented a significant psi effect but also suggested that a detectable ESP or telepathic effect may be more generally distributed among the population. The protocols themselves suggested conditions under which psi phenomena are most likely to appear.

Given its significance, the ganzfeld database attracted intense scrutiny. In a historic first, which has never really been repeated, Honorton in 1986 collaborated on a paper with a prominent psi skeptic, Ray Hyman, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. After trading written disputes over the validity of parapsychological experiments, the interlocutors decided to collaborate on a joint study for the Journal of Parapsychology, analyzing the data, highlighting areas of agreement and dispute, and recommending protocols for future experiments. In an arena where arguments often devolve into rhetoric, it proved a signature moment.

“Instead of continuing with another round of our debate on the psi ganzfeld experiments,” they wrote, “we decided to collaborate on a joint communiqué. The Honorton-Hyman debate emphasized the differences in our positions, many of these being technical in nature. But during a recent discussion, we realized that we possessed similar viewpoints on many issues concerning parapsychological research. This communiqué, then, emphasizes these points of agreement.”  

In a joint statement—one that ought to serve as a general guardrail in our era of digital attack speech—Honorton and Hyman wrote: “Both critics and parapsychologists want parapsychological research to be conducted according to the best possible standards. The critic can contribute to this need only if his criticisms are informed, relevant, and responsible.”

Beyond laying down general principles and research protocols, the collaborators conducted a joint meta-analysis of key ganzfeld experiments up to that moment.* “The data base analyzed by Hyman and Honorton,” wrote UC Irvine statistician Jessica Utts, “consisted of results taken from 34 reports written by a total of 47 authors. Honorton counted 42 separate experiments described in the reports, of which 28 reported enough information to determine the number of direct hits achieved. Twenty three of the studies (55%) were classified by Honorton as having achieved statistical significance.” The success rate was similar to Honorton’s findings in his 1978 meta-analysis.

Notably, the psychical researcher and the skeptic wrote in their abstract: “We agree that there is an overall significant effect in this data base that cannot be reasonably explained by selective reporting or multiple analysis.” And further: “Although we probably still differ on the magnitude of the biases contributed by multiple testing, retrospective experiments, and the file-drawer problem, we agree that the overall significance observed in these studies cannot reasonably be explained by these selective factors. Something beyond selective reporting or inflated significance levels seems to be producing the nonchance outcomes. Moreover, we agree that the significant outcomes have been produced by a number of different investigators.”

In sum, here was a key psychical researcher and a leading skeptic (Hyman was among the few skeptics who conducted his own research) disagreeing over the general nature of the ESP thesis—a reasonable disagreement—but affirming that the most important psychical data of the period proved unpolluted and that the methodology of the studies in their sample reflected significant improvement from the dawn of the experiments in the early to mid-1970s. But the key data, they wrote, was free from substantial error, corruption, or selective reporting. Hyman agreed that a statistically significant effect appears in the data and justifies further research. That’s all. No concession of belief in ESP. Nor was any needed. Just an informed critique by a parapsychologist and a career-long skeptic, both with significant credentials, concluding that the data and practices are normative and a statistically significant anomaly appears.

It is tragic, both in terms of human pathos and intellectual advancement, that Honorton died six years after that paper was published. He was one of the only parapsychologists able to reach across the nearly unbridgeable partisan divide to a professional skeptic and create progress in dialogue and research. That process has never been repeated. Indeed, as of this writing, Wikipedia’s article on the ganzfeld experiments introduces them as a “pseudoscientific technique,” without sourcing.

It is worth asking why this chasm has remained so wide. Wonderful strides have occurred in parapsychology, but the advances are not what they could be. Statistician Jessica Utts has noted that during the more than 110 years since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research, “the total human and financial resources devoted to parapsychology since 1882 is at best equivalent to the expenditures devoted to fewer than two months of research in conventional psychology in the United States.”

For comparison, the American Psychological Association reports that in 2017, $2 billion of the United States’ $66.5 billion in federal research funding went to psychological research.

Think of it: the field of parapsychology has, since its inception worldwide, been funded in adjusted dollars at a rate of less than two months of traditional psychological experiments in the U.S. (experiments which, like much of the work in the social sciences, are routinely overturned to reflect changes or corrections in methodology). That is less than $333,500,000, or a little more than the cost of four fighter jets. This figure compares with trillions that have been spent worldwide during the same period on physics or medical research.

This funding situation reflects, in part, the success of the most vociferous skeptics in disabling the legitimacy of parapsychological data. Most academic researchers steer clear, fearing damage to their reputation and ability to get other projects funded.  

Even in this atmosphere, however, some scientists prevail against the tide. A historic episode occurred in 2011, which marked the publication of a paper called “Feeling the Future” by well-known research psychologist Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University. For about ten years, Bem conducted a series of nine experiments involving more than 1,000 participants into precognition or “time reversing” of widely established cognitive or psychological effects, such as memorization of a list or responding to negative or erotic stimuli flashed as images on a screen. Bem’s discoveries demonstrated the capacity of cognition across boundaries of linear time.

Bem, like other researchers including Dean Radin, identified factors that seem to correlate with precognition, such as the body’s response to arousing or disturbing imagery. As Bem wrote of previous experiments: “Most of the pictures were emotionally neutral, but a highly arousing negative or erotic image was displayed on randomly selected trials. As expected, strong emotional arousal occurred when these images appeared on the screen, but the remarkable finding is that the increased arousal was observed to occur a few seconds before the picture appeared, before the computer had even selected the picture to be displayed.”

In one of Bem’s trials, subjects were asked to “guess” at erotic images alternated with benign images. “Across all 100 sessions,” he wrote, “participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% hit rate expected by chance: 53.1% . . . In contrast, their hit rate on the nonerotic pictures did not differ significantly from chance: 49.8% . . . This was true across all types of nonerotic pictures: neutral pictures, 49.6%; negative pictures, 51.3%; positive pictures, 49.4%; and romantic but nonerotic pictures, 50.2%.”

The response to either arousing or disturbing imagery is suggestive of the emotional stakes required for the presence of a psi effect. Stakes must exist, and strong emotions must be in play. Passion is critical. In New Frontiers of the Mind, Rhine emphasized the role of spontaneity, confidence, comity, novelty, curiosity, and lack of fatigue. (And, as it happens, caffeine.)

But Bem’s horizons extended further. In the most innovative element of his nine-part study, he set out to discover whether subjects displayed improved recall of lists of words that were to be practice-memorized in the future. In Bem’s words, “whether rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall—even if the rehearsal takes place after the recall test is given.”

Participants were first shown a set of words and given a free recall test of those words. They were then given a set of practice exercises on a randomly selected subset of those words. The psi hypothesis was that the practice exercises would retroactively facilitate the recall of those words, and, hence, participants would recall more of the to-be-practiced words than the unpracticed words.

Bem found a statistically significant improvement of recall on the lists of words studied in the near future: “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.” In short, future memorization heightened current recall.

Unsurprisingly, Bem’s 2011 paper met with tremendous controversy. Within a year of Bem’s publication, a trio of professional skeptics published a rejoinder. Playing off of Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” their paper sported the media-friendly title, “Failing the Future.” The experimenters reran one of Bem’s experiments. They concluded, “All three replication attempts failed to produce significant effects . . . and thus do not support the existence of psychic ability.”

But the authors omitted a critical detail from their own database. By deadline, they possessed two independent studies that validated Bem’s results. They made no mention of these studies, despite their own ground rules for doing so. Bem wrote in his response: “By the deadline, six studies attempting to replicate the Retroactive Recall effect had been completed, including the three failed replications reported by Ritchie et al. and two other replications, both of which successfully reproduced my original findings at statistically significant levels . . . Even though both successful studies were pre-registered on Wiseman’s registry and their results presumably known to Ritchie et al., they fail to mention them in this article” (emphasis added).

Although there unquestionably exists a significant crisis of replicability and data manipulation—not to mention fraud—in the sciences, no one has tied any of this to Bem or his methods. As of July 2020, Bem’s experiments (including the original trials) proved confirmatory in a meta-analysis encompassing 90 experiments in 33 laboratories in 14 countries, “greatly exceeding” the standard for “‘decisive evidence’ in support of the experimental hypothesis,” as Bem and his coauthors wrote in the abstract of their follow-up paper.

 

I believe that I am highlighting only the glacial tip of how parapsychological data is misreported within much of mainstream news media and large swaths of academia. The question returns: why? I have difficulty understanding human nature, which is, finally, the crux of the matter. After a certain point of tautological criticism of nearly a century of academic ESP research, it becomes difficult to avoid using a strong word that I prefer not to use and that I do not use lightly: suppression. Not of any centrally organized sort, but of a cultural sort in which prevailing findings run so counter to materialist assumptions that critics—who ironically perceive themselves as arbiters of rationality—assume an “at any cost” stance to dispel contrary data. Winning becomes more important than proving. It is the antithesis of science. This is the irony to which professional skepticism has brought us.

This kind of practice—in which self-perceived rationalists do injustice to truth in pursuit of what they consider a defense of rationalism—has run riot throughout the professional skeptics’ field. Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in addition to his own research into psi phenomena, has proven determined and intrepid in responding to serial problems among professional skeptics and the toll they have taken in reference media and journalism. Sheldrake was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders of the year by Switzerland’s prestigious Duttweiler Institute. Yet today on Wikipedia he is called a purveyor of “pseudoscience” for his theories of biological resonance and psi.

I have already mentioned earlier that the social and natural sciences are experiencing a credibility gap. One study has suggested that fraud rates in biomedical and psychology research are probably at a respective 9 percent and 10 percent.

I consider it defensible to state that parapsychology today may be among the few exceptions to common fraud in the social sciences. When I posted about the matter in late 2021 on social media, parapsychology journalist Craig Weiler put it this way:

Because parapsychology doesn’t convey any honors from successful research, either through social acknowledgment or an improvement in professional status, there is little motivation for cheating. Successful studies also have to run the skeptical gauntlet. So, little incentive . . . Just a personal observation, the field seems to attract uncorruptible people. The people who take it seriously and publicly, have to have a generally reduced fear level and be willing to fight for the importance of truth. That doesn’t describe your average cheater.

Indeed, it is infinitely more important to me as an advocate of parapsychology research that we get it right versus win a debate. I would rather lose ground a hundred times over than proffer an argument that is strictly rhetorical or tactical in nature or that misrepresents key findings when a debate goes against me. That is why I am so flummoxed (perhaps naively) when I encounter self-described skeptics who use deceptive or slippery methods in the interest of promulgating intellectual soundness.

The point is not to win but to search—to honor the basic human question of what lies around the next hill. Our society needs greater academic and intellectual leeway in this area so that parapsychologists need not fear damage to career or reputation. As noted, psi research is inexpensive. Because the skeptics have proven so successful, however, most parapsychologists today must secure independent funding. Anyone who has written grant proposals knows that that process can be the equivalent of a job in itself. But the men and women who populate parapsychology today carry out this labor while also conducting their research and often holding academic or clinical positions to pay the bills. What’s more, they often endure professional insults and calumny. 

I recognize that skeptics fear a wave of irrationality will be unleashed on the world if headlines start announcing, “Harvard Study Says ESP Is Real.” Consequently, they strive against that day (although in various forms it has already come and gone), just as in an exchange with Sigmund Freud, his English disciple Ernest Jones protested that acknowledging telepathy “would mean admitting the essential claim of the occultists that mental processes can be independent of the human body.”

The issues I am describing have easily cost us more than a generation of progress in parapsychology. We are at least thirty or forty years behind where we ought to be, dated from when the professional skeptical apparatus began to ramp up in the mid-1970s.

One real challenge for parapsychology—and addressing this is, I think, necessary to the field’s next leap forward—is to arrive at a theory of conveyance. I believe the field needs a persuasive theoretical model that pulls together the effects and posits how information is transferred in a manner unbound by time, space, distance, linearity, and common sensory experience. Researchers have made preliminary steps in this direction. Advances are overdue.

 

In 1960, Warren Weaver, a highly regarded mathematical engineer and grant-making science foundation executive, uttered a semifamous lament about ESP research at a panel discussion at Dartmouth College: “I find this whole field [parapsychology] intellectually a very painful one. And I find it painful essentially for the following reasons: I cannot reject the evidence and I cannot accept the conclusions.” Weaver caught hell for his statement; some colleagues questioned whether his judgment had slipped; a few others (including Dartmouth’s president) privately thanked him for broaching the topic.

Weaver had toured Rhine’s labs in early 1960. On February 22, he privately wrote Rhine to raise several issues. Near the top of his seven-page, singled-spaced letter, Weaver made this point: “For if you could make substantial progress in analyzing, explaining, and controlling, then the problem of acceptance would be largely solved.” Rhine had long labored to demonstrate effect, Weaver wrote, but he now needed to describe mechanics. His letter continued:

But for three main reasons—or at least so it seems to me—the problem of acceptance remains. First, these phenomena are so strange, so outside the normal framework of scientific understanding, that they are inherently very difficult to accept. Second, the attempts to analyze, understand, and control have not been, as yet, very successful or convincing. And third, unreasonable and stubborn as it doubtless appears to you, very many scientists are not convinced by the evidence which you consider is more than sufficient to establish the reality of the psi phenomena.

            Rhine replied:           

The three main reasons you give in your analysis are recognizably correct. Had you been inclined at this point to go a step further into the intellectual background for these reasons, this might have been the point to draw upon the judgments of some of the philosophers and other commentators who have dealt with the problem of acceptance. There is an increasingly candid recognition of the difficulty as an essentially metaphysical one. Psi phenomena appear to challenge the assumption of a physicalistic universe.

Rhine was reluctant to draw theoretical conclusions from his findings. As his daughter, Sally Rhine Feather, wrote in a private communication to me: “I have never known him to have gone very far in this direction . . . But he was always so cautious at going beyond the data and had this aversion to philosophers who did so—except for the implications of the nonphysical nature of psi on which he actually speculated extremely broadly at times.” She went on to quote from his book New World of the Mind: “It will be the task of biophysics and psychophysics to find out if there are unknown, imperceptible, extraphysical influences in nature that function in life and mind, influences which can interact with detectable physical processes.” 

In his response to Weaver, Rhine was referencing commonly accepted physical laws at the time. For psychical researchers today, studies in quantum theory, retrocausality, extradimensionality, neuroplasticity, string theory, and “morphic fields” that enable communication at the cellular level (the innovation of Rupert Sheldrake) suggest a set of physical laws that surpass the known and may serve as a kind of macroverse within which familiar mechanics are experienced. It was already clear in Rhine’s era that extrasensory transmission could not be explained through a “mental radio” model, since, according to Rhine’s tests and those of others, ESP is unaffected by time, distance, or physical barriers.

This returns us to the question: If the psi effect is real, how does it work? How does mentality exceed the obvious boundaries of sensory transmission?

Perhaps science overvalues theory. Nonetheless, I believe that it falls to each generation to venture a theory of phenomena in which it professes deep interest. That theory can ignite a debate—it can be thrown out and replaced, it can be modified—but I do not believe that researchers and motivated lay inquirers (like me) can eschew the task. For this reason, I attempted a theory of mind causation in the closing chapter of my 2018 book The Miracle Club entitled, “Why It Works.”

Consider this: when you say the word precognition, it strikes many people as fantastical, as though we are entering crystal-ball territory. Why the incredulity? We already know, and have known for generations, that linear time as we experience it is an illusion. Einstein’s theories of relativity, and experiments that have affirmed them, establish that time slows down in conditions of extreme velocity—at or approaching light speed—and in conditions of extreme gravity, like black holes. The individual traveling in a metaphorical spaceship at or near light speed experiences time slowing (not from their perspective but in comparison to those not at that speed), and this is not a mere thought exercise. Space travelers in our era, although they are obviously not approaching anywhere near that velocity, experience minute effects of time reduction.

In short, linear time is a necessary illusion for five-sensory beings to get through life. Time is not an absolute. What’s more, ninety years of work in quantum physics leads us to conclude that we face an infinitude of concurrent realities—not in possibility but in actuality—one of which we will localize or experience within our framework based upon perspective or when we look.

To switch tacks, string theory posits that all of reality is interconnected by vast networks of vibrating strings. Everything, from the tiniest particle to entire universes to other dimensions, is linked by these undulating strings. Hence something that occurs within another dimension not only affects what happens in the reality of the dimension that we occupy but signals an infinitude of events playing out in these other fields of existence, as in ours.

We may even crisscross into these concurrent realities, occupying lives that are infinite in terms of the psyche and variable in dimensional occupancy. Experiencing data or events from other dimensions may also be extrapolated to UFO encounters or other anomalous phenomena.

Perhaps an individual, either because he or she is uniquely sensitive at a given moment or experiences a reduction of sensory data while retaining awareness (as in the ganzfeld experiments), is capable of accessing information—or taking measurements—from other states or dimensions that exist along the theorized bands of strings. We call these measurements precognition, telepathy, ESP, or psychokinesis, the last of which may be a form of preawareness or movement or both. But maybe that is simply what finer measurement looks like. It is possible that measurement not only informs but also (at least in certain cases) actualizes, localizes, and determines. Measurement selects. Perhaps if we gleaned what was actually going on, or exercised fuller capacities of sensation, the experience would prove overwhelming. We would be overcome with data. Hence we may need a linear sense of time and a limited field of information in order to navigate experience.

And yet: given that we understand spacetime as flexible, is it really so strange, so violative of our current body of knowledge, that there exist quantifiable exceptions to ordinary sensory experience? As we document these exceptions, trace their arc, and replicate the conditions under which they occur, perhaps we approach what poet and mystic William Blake foresaw in 1790 in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” And thus ineffable.

* A meta-analysis is a cumulative study of different but similar experiments to test pooled data for statistical significance. 

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian and writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library whose books include Occult America, Uncertain Places, and Daydream Believer, from the last of which this article is abridged. Full footnotes appear in the book.

---

Printed in the  Winter 2023 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "A New Science of the Heavens: An Interview with Robert Temple" Quest 111:1, pg 12-17

By Richard Smoley

Robert Temple is a multifaceted writer and thinker whose work extends across many disciplines. From his work with Joseph Needham, author of the monumental Science and Civilisation in China, he wrote a book on Chinese science and technology, The Genius of China. He has also written The Crystal Sun, a study of over 400 ancient optical artifacts that were hidden in the basements of the world’s museums.

Temple is perhaps best known for The Sirius Mystery, which discusses a West African tribe called the Dogon, who possess knowledge of the Sirius star system that preceded recent astronomical discoveries.

This Zoom interview is dedicated to Temple’s latest book, A New Science of Heaven. It contains astonishing revelations about the new frontier of physics, which has to do with plasma—a fourth state of matter in addition to solids, liquids, and gases.

Richard Smoley: You’ve done an extraordinary number of fascinating things across the course of your career; any one of them would be a subject for a much longer interview, but we will focus this one on your latest book, A New Science of Heaven. It’s about a fourth state of matter called plasma. This comes out of physics, not metaphysics; it’s not occult in any way. But you say that it has an enormous significance for us. To begin with, what is plasma?

Robert Temple: Plasma is a fourth state of matter. It was officially discovered in 1879 by the English scientist Sir William Crookes, who was the inventor of the vacuum tube.

He discovered this phenomenon going on in his tubes, and he named it “radiant matter.” The name was changed in 1928 by Irving Langmuir to “plasma.” (I must stress that it has no connection whatsoever with blood plasma.)

Plasma is a form of matter that’s not made of atoms; it’s made of particles: electrons and protons, which have opposite charges to one another, and ions. Ions are often considered incomplete atoms, because they don’t have a balanced charge. I look at it the other way around: I look at atoms as value-added ions. They can have positive or negative charge, but we’re really only concerned with positively charged ions, which are the most common and which compose, for instance, the solar wind that blows out from the sun and fills the solar system.

When plasma was originally encountered, it appeared to be only a gas, but we now know that it can be a liquid. And it can not only be a solid, it can be crystals, so for some years now the few scientists who work on the fringes of physics and deal with these things have been dealing with plasma crystals. There are hot plasmas and cold plasmas. Most of the work that’s taking place at the moment is on the hot ones, because those are concerned with trying to control nuclear fusion to make energy. They haven’t succeeded in doing that.

The plasmas that I’m most concerned about in my book are the space plasmas, and they tend to be cold plasmas—much colder than anything on earth.

I should point out that until 1962, it was universally believed by the world’s scientific establishment that outer space was empty. We grew up as children being told outer space was a total vacuum and nothingness, and we now know that it’s actually the very opposite.

Smoley: How does this new discovery of plasma change our understanding of the universe?

Temple: It changes it completely. Because the universe is now known by astrophysicists to be composed of 99.9 percent plasma. For instance, our sun is completely made of plasma; it’s not made of atoms. And we have a universe which is made of plasma: nonatomic matter.

Our basic physics—classical physics—has already been left behind by relativity theory and quantum theory, but even what we consider today to be advanced modern physics is wholly inadequate, because it’s based upon the assumption that the universe is made of atoms, and it’s not. It’s made of plasma, which is very different and behaves very differently from atomic or physical matter. The equations which govern its behavior are all nonlinear equations, which are hard to deal with, and it doesn’t follow all of our customary laws: it won’t sit and beg like a good dog. In fact it’s a big, black, barking, threatening universe, and it doesn’t want to have tiny humans on rocky planets in the middle of nowhere trying to impose their laws upon it.

So we have to change our science. We need a new physics, but don’t worry: it’s already on the way, because there are branches of physics at this moment where the new science is being created. There are other branches as well: there’s topological physics, which is very exciting, and there’s information physics, which is an extension of it; it’s being driven forward by the search for quantum computers.

Yet a great deal of plasma physics is not publicly known, because a lot of these advances are taking place in two different areas which have vested interests in keeping them secret. First of all, if you have a corporation, you’ve got commercial motives.

If you’re in possession of some great new idea about how to make quantum computers work, you’re not going to tell the other companies, so all the scientists working on this have signed confidentiality and secrecy agreements. We can understand that perfectly, because there’s hundreds of billions of dollars involved for anybody who’s got the new angle. This may impede the flow of knowledge and certainly public understanding, but these commercial imperatives are at work.

Even stricter than those are the military controls, because most of this kind of work is funded by the defense establishment and the security establishment, and they overclassify everything. They’re not really interested in the public: who cares about those stupid morons out there who pay their taxes? It’s all got to be secret, because there are always enemies, and we can’t say anything, because the enemies might know.

So what with the military and security restrictions and the commercial restrictions, these frontiers of physics don’t have much of a chance to trickle down to us.

That’s why I believe that my book is unique, because I’ve gone to immense trouble to gather this information to the extent that is possible (and indeed I went beyond the possible in many instances) and boil it down into a book that can be understood by somebody who doesn’t know any science at all. As you read the book, I lead you by the hand, and I explain everything as I go on. If you don’t know what a semiconductor is or what superconductivity is, I tell you in an easy way.

Furthermore, I’ve done an audio recording of the book myself, which is available from the same publisher, and some of my friends who have read or listened to my book are reading it or listening to it twice—not because it’s difficult: they all say they understand it. But there’s so much information that they have to go over it again, because everything in the book is new, and it takes a bit of getting used to.

Smoley: I’ve read your book, and I would agree with the things you’ve said about it. I did find it very comprehensible. Yet it was overwhelming, not because it was difficult, but because it transforms our view of reality. What we think of as reality has very little to do even with what we conceive of as physical reality. How do these ideas affect our understanding of the day-to-day world?

Temple: They have the potential to change everything. We’ve got an infinite future ahead of us, since I don’t believe that anybody can die, much less does die. We have to get ourselves in shape to face that, and we can’t do it with our present concepts.

I’ve struggled with all of this myself. You’ve mentioned how difficult it was for you, not to take it in but to face the consequences. I’ve been going through that agony for years. Because I knew how overwhelming it was, I tried to lessen the challenge by making it as accessible as I possibly could.

We have to realize several key things which are different than what we think. There are very few rocky planets made of what we call physical matter. Of course, there may be hundreds of billions of them, but that’s a mere nothing compared to the others. We also need to realize that our physical bodies are what I tend to call smart overcoats, our real selves being bioplasma bodies. That’s what leaves the physical body at death and continues its existence on what you could describe as another plane.

The intelligence in the universe is cosmic. These plasmas can form dusty complex clouds, which have the capacity to self-organize by the process which has become known as emergence and develop intelligence. There are complex plasma clouds throughout the universe. We see them everywhere: every star is a complex plasma cloud, including our own sun. Lightning, by the way, is plasma; the center of a candle flame is plasma. We have plasma in us: our physical bodies are full of currents of plasma; every cell has protons going across the membrane. The heart is an electromagnetic device, which happens to activate itself as a muscle, but the fact is that we, even in our physical form, are electromagnetic beings. And the core of ourselves is our bioplasma cells, which are entirely plasma and electromagnetic.

Plasma has positive charges and negative charges, and it can contain modules within it, countless ones. For instance, a bioplasma body that is the same size as a physical body will have an interior structure far more complex than our physical bodies. Indeed, we are very complex bioplasma bodies, which exceed in complexity the anatomy of our physical bodies.

Smoley: It has long been held that there are all sorts of subtle bodies, which are nonphysical. Some of these have been described as etheric bodies or astral bodies; there also seems to be the substance called the life force, which science, for some reason, refuses to admit the existence of. How does plasma relate to these concepts?

Temple: There have been many inspired people—psychics and seers and so on—who have intuited all the things which modern science can now demonstrate. You mentioned subtle bodies, and you can look at that wonderful book The Subtle Body by G.R.S. Mead, which is a classic example (he’s one of my intellectual heroes, by the way).

I believe that there’s more than one level to the bioplasma body. That was known to the ancient Egyptians, who had many different souls; the ba and so on, the highest one being the akh.

This is the perennial wisdom, and this is what Mme. Blavatsky was trying to institutionalize. She thought she ought to get this deep wisdom organized, propagated, and preserved—and to be analyzed as well. This perennial wisdom is true. Just because it’s been mocked and sneered at by people who arrogantly believe themselves to be rational (this just means narrow-minded) doesn’t mean that it’s false.

Science has finally begun to catch up with ancient wisdom. We’re getting to the point where, on the very fringes of science, unreported to the public, never mentioned in the media, is all the stuff that I’ve gathered together in my book, which proves scientifically that this ancient wisdom is all true.

That’s why it’s so important. We have to get this basic material propagated, we have to tell people, because the entire future of the planet really depends on this. Forget CO₂ and climate change, compared to what we’re talking about. Ultimately it doesn’t even matter if the earth should be destroyed by climate change; the fact is, the universe won’t be. I don’t think that the planet is going to be destroyed, but even if it were, we won’t be destroyed. We will continue to exist as bioplasma beings in a plasma world, which cannot be destroyed by climate change, because there’s no climate in the plasma world; there’s no weather; there’s no rain; there’s no heat; there’s no cold. Even if everything were to be destroyed on this planet, we would all still exist. The efforts that we make here and now to understand the universe and get ourselves into gear properly will continue, even if only on what’s traditionally been called the spiritual level.

Smoley: You have pointed out that the ancient Egyptians knew about these subtle bodies, and there are teachings about them in most esoteric traditions. Does that mean that humans have a capacity to somehow organically perceive the subtle bodies?

Temple: I’m so glad you asked that, Richard. Yes, I do believe that. Today we live in a society which is intensely materialistic, I would say very decadent. It’s shut itself off from what is traditionally called the spiritual.

I do believe that every human being has the capacity for intuition of the deeper truths if they’re sufficiently open, but most people today are being artificially closed by bad forces, like addiction to cell phones. Nobody any longer has any reflection time or time to get their heads together. We need to clear away the information clutter and the excess radiation that is being generated by all these devices and give ourselves a bit of peace. We need to set aside time to sit and meditate; we need to make our lives more peaceful if we possibly can.

When we do that, I believe that we can have the truths come to us, because we are surrounded by information space, as I call it. I get a lot of my intuitions from my ability to contact and penetrate information space. If we really concentrate on that and give it its chance, we can open ourselves. In ancient times, the priests and seers were attempting to draw the deeper truths and sacred intuitions down into their minds. I think that there was more of a direct connection to the deeper truths in simpler times.

Smoley: One thing that I found fascinating in your book was the plasma clouds that you described between the earth and the moon, Could you explain those a little?

Temple: We have programs looking for extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m convinced we have it in the form of these two giant clouds, which together are eighteen times the size of the earth.

They are between the earth and the moon—not in a direct line of sight, but at sixty-degree angles to the left and to the right as you look towards the moon. They are at Lagrange points four and five. These are points in between bodies in space where the gravitational pull of those bodies is effectively neutralized,

where the gravitational pull of the moon and the gravitational pull of the earth balance out, and there’s nothing pulling you anywhere.

These clouds were first discovered in 1961 by a Polish observational astronomer called Kordylewski. They don’t emit any light, and they’re almost entirely transparent and therefore very difficult to detect. In 2019, their existence was finally confirmed by a team of Hungarian astronomers, which Kordylewski couldn’t do in 1961 for two reasons: he didn’t have modern equipment, and as his great grandson has told me, the Polish Communist government didn’t like him and stopped his work. The Hungarians came charging in on their white horses to the rescue, and they proved that he was right.

I found the Hungarian scientists, contacted the woman who’s in charge of them, and asked, “Are you studying the plasma aspects of the clouds?” She said, “No, we’re only studying the celestial mechanics aspects.”

I thought, “I’m going to do something about this quick,” so I got on to my great friend the professor of astrophysics Chandra Wickramasinghe, who was the main protégé of the astronomer Fred Hoyle (whom I knew very well). Chandra didn’t know about these Kordylewski Clouds; very few people did. “We have to do a paper; would you do it with me?” I asked. And so we did a paper together, which was an advance in astrophysics, and it’s reprinted as an appendix to my book.

We call attention to the fact that dusty complex plasmas in space like this would almost certainly have evolved intelligence. Considering that they are probably billions of years old, they would have intelligence so great that it would dwarf the pretenses of the American security establishment, with their supercomputers in Utah, where they store every phone call and every email. They think it’s going to make them all-wise, but of course they can’t process all that, whereas these clouds can process everything, since, I believe, they’re conscious; they’re alive.

Their existence was intuited in antiquity, because in Gnostic Christianity, there are descriptions of gigantic intelligent entities above the atmosphere between the earth and the moon. They were superentities presiding over the earth. One of them was called Metatron, which is the name of the angel of the Lord.

It’s a big stretch to realize that we may have intelligent, although inorganic, extraterrestrial life between us and the moon.

We don’t know whether they would have emotions and feelings—maybe they do—but they would have fantastic and imaginable computing power. They would know everything about the entire history of the earth and everything on it. They would probably also be great predictors of the future. They could probably tell us what’s going to happen six months from now.

I do believe that these entities have attempted to communicate with us, and that we didn’t notice. There is a history of their attempts to communicate with us. I had a whole section of the book about that, which was removed by the publishers, so I’ll have to publish it at some point. But that’s another story.

These entities are not just big; they’re different, and they’re not necessarily going to look at things the way we do here on planet earth. The security agencies will consider this—as they already consider the whole question of extraterrestrial life—as the number one security issue for the world.

Now we come to the question, are the clouds friendly,  or do they hate us? I think the answer is very plain: if they weren’t friendly, we wouldn’t be here. I believe that they’re hoping we will make it, and they keep trying to help us by sending down  waves of thought that sensitives can pick up. They can’t declare themselves, come down, and say, “Look, we’re going to sort out your politics for you; we’re going to stop wars.” But they must be quite worried about what we’re going to do with the planet, and I’m convinced that they want us to make it.

Smoley: How do we know that these plasma clouds are intelligent?

Temple: Having read the book, you have seen that there’s been a lot of work done, mostly by Russian scientists; it’s all laid out in the book. By spontaneous processes of self-organization when these clouds come together, they can generate emergence: intelligence, which then becomes more and more intelligent and keeps growing. If they are billions of years old, you can’t even begin to imagine how intelligent they are.

Dusty complex plasmas are a very special kind of plasma kind of plasma. To become intelligent, a plasma cloud has to have dust. If there isn’t any around that it can gather up, it’ll make its own. It’s self-sufficient in a way, but it does need energy coming in.

Smoley: You suggest, as many people have, that there are forces that are very much interested in our awakening. Yet there seem to be all sorts of factors that impede or subvert these efforts toward illumination. It almost seems as if there’s one group out there that is trying to enlighten us, and another group that is trying to put the lid on us.

Temple: I think there’s a war between good and evil going on throughout the universe, and we’re in the crossfire. Let’s face it: we live in a world today where authoritarianism is spreading rapidly everywhere, and we’ve got all these horrible people who are trying to enslave humanity.

I think that humans are of some very special interest to the higher entities. You can imagine there must be lots of other physical spaces in the universe, whose beings are incredibly dull but very good. And then there will be others who are totally bad. We’re kind of a mixture.

I believe that we are bringing interest to the cosmic anthropologists because we’re a strange kind of experiment on the borderline between madness and creativity. We are uniquely able to be creative. Where does all this come from? At the same time, a lot of intensely creative people are pretty wild and wooly characters, and a bit crazy. There’s a thin line between genius and madness; a lot of the supermathematicians are autistic.

We’re not boring as a species, but we’re also loaded with psychopaths. I would say, at least 10 percent of humanity is psychopathic; some people would say 20 percent. We can never seem to quite get rid of all the psychopaths.

Now this is all part of the cosmic anthropological study of us, you see. What the higher entities want to know is, can this work? In other words, can they somehow come up with a model of a human species that isn’t quite as crazy, but still retains the creativity? Or do we have to be this crazy in order to be this creative?

We don’t know the answer to that question. I bet these entities don’t either, because we’re a running experiment, and they are interested to see the outcome. They try not to interfere because it would disturb the experiment. They can’t come down and kill all the bad guys; that would perturb the experiment, and then it wouldn’t be an experiment anymore.

We have been studied without being interfered with. We have to be left to our own devices as long as possible, until we get to the point where we might really all destroy ourselves in a sort of huge catastrophe; then there might be intervention.

But after all, even if the physical world were to be destroyed, as I’ve already said, we as bioplasma beings would still exist. But where would we go?

Smoley: I would like to ask a question raised by something Fred Hoyle said that you quoted in your book: that the scientific peer review process is merely a retardation of the advancement of knowledge. Could you expand on that a little?

Temple: In my book, I give case histories of scientists who have made crucial experiments but who have been prevented from publishing. One leading case is Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer who in the late forties and all through the fifties kept trying to publish his paper showing evidence that outer space was not empty. The establishment insisted that it was empty; it was a vacuum. So he couldn’t get his paper published for ten years.

Zwicky went to every physics and astrophysics journal in the world. They all said no. They refused to publish his evidence that outer space was not empty. The head of his own observatory wrote to the journal editors and said, “Whatever you do, don’t publish Zwicky’s paper.” Of course, this man behaved illegally, but he was never held to account.

 Finally Zwicky went to a biology journal and got it—an astronomical article—published; it was in a peer-reviewed biology journal. This meant that he could have offprints from the publication, which he could then send to all the astronomers. It took him ten years to get around the blockage.

This is an example of how the advancement of knowledge is held back, not just by the peer review process, which is almost continually abused, but by the knowledge control freaks. The establishment doesn’t want to be shown to be wrong, because people would lose face and their reputations would be damaged. They want to always be correct, and they want to be the wise ones. If you come up with anything that goes against what they’ve already said, they’ll try and stop you, just for egotistical reasons.

The whole peer review process is to maintain the status quo of science and prevent advances and anything that challenges the establishment; that’s what it’s for. Fred said this because he could not get certain important discoveries published. It happens to everybody. My book is full of these terrible stories of suppression.

 A lot of scientists, unfortunately, are human, with human faults, and egotism is one of the worst of them. My book is full of the sad stories of the heroes of plasma science, who have fought against all the odds to get us to where we are now, which is just the beginning.

---

VOLUME 111, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

A New Science of the Heavens: An Interview with Tobert Temple
Richard Smoley

The Parapsychology Revolution: The Extraordinary Progress of the "Elusive Science"
Mitch Horowitz

The Esotericism of the Spine and the Cerebrospinal Fluid
 Lauren Buys

The Spiritual Awakening of the Third Eye
Teresa Keast

Abraham Maslow: Getting Back to Human Nature
Gary Lachman

From the Editor's Desk
Richad Smoley

Members' Forum: Parapsychology fom th Therapist's Couch
Rozi Ulics

Viwpoint: The Third Object, Unity, and Altruism
Barbara Hebert

 

---

In this page you will find book reviews published in Quest Magazine from 1988 to 2025.

Winter 2025

Maurice Nicoli: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way
By Gary Lachman: reviewed by John Shirley

Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa
by Anthony Grafton; reviewed by Peter A. Huff

An Outline of The Secret Doctrine
by Franz Hartmann, translated by Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer; reviewed by Richard Smoley

Fall 2024

Theosophy And the Study of Religion
Edited by Charles M. Stang and Jason Ananda Josephson Storm

American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelplus
by Timothy Grieve-Carlson

The First Alchemists: The Spiritual and Practical Origins of the Noble and Holy Art
by Tobias Churton

Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself
Tracy Cochran

Summer 2024

Theurgy, Theory and Practice: The Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine, Homeric Epics, the Chaldean Oracles, and Neoplatonic Ritual
by P.D. Newman

Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichus
by Gregory Shaw

Embodied Imaginations: Fictional Characters Making Experiential Crossings into Real Life: An Unusual Phenomenon
by Chidambaram Ramesh

Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts
by Nancy Mujo Bakerby 

 

Spring 2024

Nicholas Roerich: The Artist Who Would Be King
by John McCannon reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Rising Up into the Divine: World Mystics on the Ascent of Your Soul
by Lucia Lena Hodges reviewed Clare Goldsberry

Proof of Life after Life: Seven Reasons to Believe There Is an Afterlife
Raymond A. Moody and Paul Perry reviewed by Antti Savinainen

 

Winter 2024

Modern Occultism: Hisory, Theory and Practice
by Mitch Horowitz; reviewed by Jordan Gruber

Blessed by Mysterious Grace
by Ravi Ravindra; reviewed by Adele Chabelski

A Solution to a Pointless Life; Spiritual Self- Help for Personal Development
by Albret Amao Soria; reviewed by Von Brachler

100 Places to See after You Die
by Ken Jennings; reviewed by Petere Orvetti

The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-98
by Dominic Green; reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea
by Graham Philips; reviewed by Richard Smoley

 

Fall 2023

Approaching the Secret Doctrine: Its Teachings and Practical Application
by Pablo Sender reviewed by Richard Smoley

The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness
by thomas Moore reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Quantum Spirituality: Science Gostic Mysticism, and Connecting with Source Consciousness
By Peter Canova reviewed by Claire Goldsberry

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 3: Philosophical Schools
edited by Thupten Jinpa reviewed by Dhananjay Joshi

God on Psyhchedelics: Tripping across the Rubble of Old-Time Religion
by Don Lattin

 

Summer 2023

The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Controversial Scholar, a Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, and the Fierce Debate over Its Authenticity 
by Brent C. Lanau, reviewed by Richard Smoley

What I Don't Know about Death: Refections on Buddhism and Mortality
by C.W. Huntington Jr, reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation 
by Ronald Hutton, reviewed by Peter A. Huff

Spring 2023

Seven Games of Life and How to Play
by Richard Smoley, reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Earth's Hidden Reality: Discover It, Explore It, Embrace It
by Mark Hunter Brooks, reviewed by Andre Juliao and Andre Clewell

Making the Ordinary Extraordinary: My Seven Years in Occult Los Angeles with Manly Palmer Hall
by Tamra Lucid, reviewed by Nancy Bragin

The Land of the Gods: The Long-Hidden Story of Visiting the Masters of Wisdom in Shambhala
by (H.P. Blavatsky;) Franz Hartmann, reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

Hermetic Spirituality and the Gistorical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in  Late Antiquity
by Wouter J.Hanegraaff, reviewed by Mitch Horowitz

The Contemplative Tarot: A Christian Guide to the Cards
by Brittany Muller, reviewed by John Plummer

The Kabbalistic Tree
by J.H. Chajes, reviewed by Richard Smoley

 

Winter 2023

Lightbringers of the North: Secrets of the Occult Tradition of Finland
By Perttu Hakkinen and Vesa Litti: reviewed by Antti Savinainen

Painting the Cosmos: A Metaphyscial Universe
by Carolyn Wayland: reviewed by David Bruce

Philosophy for Passengers
By Michael Marder; reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

To Light the Flame of Reason: Clear Thinking for the Twenty-First Century
By Christer Sturmark: reviewed by Peter A. Huff

Julian of Norwich, The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine "Revelations of Divine Love"
by Mirabai Starr; reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Fall 2022

Mindful Medicine: Forty Simple Practices to Help Healthcare Professionals Heal Burnout and Reconnect to Purpose
By Jan Chozen Bays, MD, reviewed by Dhananjay Joshi

Poems of Bliss
by Geoffrey Hodson, reviewed by Nathaniel Altman

Poems of Contemplation
Elizabeth and John Sell, reviewed by Nathaniel Altman

Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World
by Roger R. Jackson, reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

Summer 2022

Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living
by David Fideler; reviewed by Dhananjay Joshi

Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis
by Peter Lamborn Wilson; reviewed by Richard Smoley

Vajrakilaya: A Complete Guide with Experiential Instructions
by Kyabje Garchen Rinpoche; reviewed by Richard Smoley

Rose Paradise: Essays of Fathoming--Gurdjieff, the Mahatmas, Andree, the Emerald Tablets, OAHSPE, and More
by Frankie Pauling Hutton: reviewed by Joel Sunbear

Spring 2022

The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being
by Clare Goldsberry; reviewed by David Bruce

The Afterlife Frequency: The Scientific Proof of Spiritual Contact and How That Awareness Will Change Your Life
by Mark Antony; reviewed by Clare Goldsberry

Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transforamtion
by Steve Taylor; reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Introducing Swedenborg
by Peter Ackroyd;
introducing Swedenborg: Correspondeces
by Gary Lachman; reviewed by Peter A. Huff

Three Books of Occult Philosophy
by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa;
translated by Eric Purdue; reviewed by Richard Smoley

The Magic of Makarasana: The Yoga Posture That Will Transform Your Life 
by Teresa Keast; reviewed by Tim Wyatt

Winter 2022

Future Morality
Edited by David Edmonds: reviewed by Antoinette LaFarge

Annie Besant in India
Compiled by C.V. Agarwal and Pedro Oliveira: reviewed by Peter Orvetti

Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Someting Rather than Nothing
by Richard Grossinger; reviewed by Dhanajay Joshi

Introduction  to Magic, Volume 3: Realizations of the Absolute Individual
by Julius Evola and the UR Group; translated by Joscelyn Godwin; reviewed by Richard Smoley

The History of Tarot Art
by Holly Adams Easley and Esther Joy Archer; reviewed by Richad Smoley

Fall 2021

A Healer’s Journey to Intuitive Knowing: The Heart of Therapeutic Touch
Dolores Krieger

The Miracle Month: Thirty Days to a Revolution in Your Life / The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments into Miracles
Mitch Horowitz

The Ethics of Oneness: Emerson, Whitman, and the Bhagavad Gita
Jeremy David Engels

The Elements of the Cosmos: Numbers and Letters as Archetypes
Scenza

Summer 2021

The Truth about Magic
Richard Smoley

After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond
Bruce Greyson, M.D.

Everyone’s Book of the Dead: A Panoramic Compendium of Death and Dying: The After-Death States, Karma, and Reincarnation throughout World History
Tim Wyatt

Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die
Steven Nadler

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 2: The Mind
Conceived and introduced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, edited by Thubten Jinpa, with contextual essays by John D. Dunne

 

Spring 2021

Blavatsky Unveiled: The Writings of H.P. Blavatsky in Modern English, Volume I
edited by Moon Laramie
The Chela's Handbook
compiled by William Wilson Quinn
The Spiritual Roots of the Tarot: The Cathar Code Hidden in the Cards
Russell A. Sturgess
Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft from the Ice Age to the Present
Chris Gosden
The Yoga of Jesus: Teachings of Esoteric Christianity
Mauri Lehtovirta
Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises
Joseph Azze

Winter 2021

Recycled Lives: A Reincarnation in Blavatsky's Theosophy
Julie Chajes
Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
Tara Isabella Burton
Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are
James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber
Creating a Life of Integrity: In Conversation with Joseph Goldstein
Gail Andersen Stark
Forbidden Fruits: An Occult Novel
Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro
A Scheme of Heaven: The History of Astrology and the Search for our Destiny in Data
Alexander Boxer 

Fall 2020

That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation
David Bentley Hart
Conspiracy Theories
Quassim Cassam
The End of Quantum Reality
Written and produced by Richard Deland

Summer 2020

Awaken the Power Within: In Defense of Self-Help
Albert Amao
Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe
Brian Greene
Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart
Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, adn kimberly Loh
Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck
David Nichtern

Spring 2020

English Illuminati: Including the History of the Order of the Illuminati and the Mysteries of the Illuminati
Alastair McGawn Lees
Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being
Agustin Fuentes
Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times
Thomas Waters

Winter 2020
Giza’s Industrial Complex: Ancient Egypt’s Electrical Power and Gas Generating Systems
James Ernest Brown, Dr. J.J. Hurtak, and Dr. Desiree Hurtak
A Short Philosophy of Birds
Philippe J. DuBois and Elise Rousseau, translated by Jennifer Higgins
I Know What I Saw: Modern-Day Encounters with Monsters of New Urban Legend and Ancient Lore
Linda S. Godfrey
God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness
Stephen G. Post
The Art and Science of Initiation Edited by Jedidiah French and Angel Millar

 

Fall 2019
A Theology of Love: Reimagining Christianity through A Course in Miracles A Course in Miracles Richard Smoley
Love on Every Breath: Tonglen Meditation for Transforming Pain into JoyTonglenLove on Every Breath: Tonglen
Meditation for Transforming Pain into Joy Lama Palden Drolma
Welcoming the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World Pema Chodron
Practical Spirituality: Selected Works of John Sell Edited by Elizabeth Sell
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy Edited by Mark Sedgwick

Summer 2019
Living on the Inner Edge: A Practical Esoteric Tale by Cyrus Tyan
Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy by Roger Lipsey
Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication by Oren Jay Sofer
Correspondence: 1927–87, Joseph Campbell Edited by Evans Lansing Smith and Dennis Patrick Slattery

Spring 2019
Physicians’ Untold Stories by Scott J. Kolbaba, M.D.
The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties: The Magic, Myth, and Music of the Decade That Changed the World by
Tobias Churton
The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality by Mitch Horowitz
Effortless Living: Wu-Wei and the Spontaneous State of Natural Harmony by Jason Gregory

Winter 2019
Evolution of the Higher Consciousness: An In-Depth Study into H.P. Blavatsky’s Teachings by Pablo Sender
An Ocean of Light: Contemplation, Transformation, and Liberation by Martin Laird
Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass
The Gurdjieff Movements: A Communication of Ancient Wisdom by Wim Van Dullemen
Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch over Human Destiny by Mark Stavish

Summer 2018
The Collected Letters of Alan Watts   Edited by Joan Watts and Anne Watts
Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump  by Gary Lachman
Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 1: The Physical World  Edited by Thupten Jinpa
Annie Besant (1847–1933): Struggles and Quest  by Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière

Spring 2018
From Death to Rebirth: Teachings of the Finnish Sage Pekka Ervast  by Jouni Marjanen, Antti Savinainen, and Jouku Sorvali, eds. Foreword by Richard  Smoley
Aging with Wisdom: Reflections, Stories, and Teachings  by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle
Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries  by Rami Shapiro

Winter 2018
Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection Sharon Salzberg
Into the Mystic: The Visionary and Ecstatic Roots of 1960s Rock and Roll Christopher Hill
Your Inner Islands:The Keys to Intuitive Living Will Tuttle, Ph.D

Fall 2017
Out of Darkness: From Chaos to Clarity via Meditation Cecil Messer
The Bhagavad Gita: A Guide to Navigating the Battle of Life; A New Translation and Commentary Ravi Ravindra
A Guided Tour of Hell: A Graphic Memoir Samuel Bercholz

Spring 2017
Taormina’s Historic Past and Continuing Story: A Unique Spiritual Community in Ojai, by Helene Vachet
The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, by Éliphas  Lévi, translated by John Michael Greer and Mark Anthony Mikituk
Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman

Winter 2017
How Soon Is Now? From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation by Daniel Pinchbeck
Letters to the Sage: Selected Correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson, Volume One: The Esotericists PATRICK D. BOWEN and K. PAUL JOHNSON, editors
Tarot Triumphs: Using the Marseilles Tarot Trumps for Divination and Inspiration by CHERRY GILCHRIST

Fall 2016
Faith Beyond Belief: Spirituality for Our Times; A Conversation. by David Stenidl-Rast and Ansel Grrun
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast, Editors 
Insights from the Masters: A Compilation by Fions C. Odgren

Summer 2016
Inside Knowledge: How to Activate the Radical New Vision of Reality of Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku, Jack Petranker, Editor
Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State, by Joscelyn Godwin
Super Mind: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life through Transcendental Meditation, by Norman E. Rosenthal, M.D.
Under a Sacred Sky: Essays on the Practice and Philosophy of Astrology, by Ray Grasse
How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, by Richard Smoley

Spring 2016
The Metaphysics of Ping-Pong, by Guido Mina Di Sospiro
The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, by Edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr Et Al.
Esoteric Instructions, H.P. Blavatsky, Edited by Michael Gomes
The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, by Steve McIntosh

Winter 2016
A Jewel on a Silver Platter: Remembering Jiddu Krishnamurti by Padmanabhan Krishna
The Process of Self-Transformation by Vicente Hao Chin, Jr.
Art, Science, Religion, Spiritualiy: Seeking Wisdom and Harmony for a Fulfilling Life by David White
Prophet for Our Times: The Life and Teachings of Peter Deunov by David Lorimer

Fall 2015
A Most Unusual Life: Dora Van Gelder Kunz: Clairvoyant, Theosophist, Healer by Kirsten Van Gelder and Frank Chesley
Sweet Synchronicity: Finding Annie Besant, Discovering Krishnamurti by Elizabeth Spring
Empress of Swindle: The Life of Ann Odelia Diss Debarr by John Benedict Buescher
Jerusalem! The Real Life of William Blake by Tobias Churton

Summer 2015
Sharing the Light: Further Writings of Geoffrey Hodson, Volume Three Edited by John and Elizabeth Sell and Roselmo Z. Doval Santos
Masters of Wisdom: The Mahatmas, Their Letters, and the Path by Edward Abdill
Season of the Witch: How the Occult Saved Rock and Roll by Peter Bebergal
Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature's Intelligence by David Fideler

Spring 2015
Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists by Gary Lachman
Taking the Adventure: Faith and Our Kinship with Animals aking the Adventure:Faith and Our Kinship with Animals by Gracia Fay Ellwood
Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness, and Love by Stephan Bodian

Winter 2015
The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness by Richard Smoley
Healing without Medicine: From Pioneers to Modern Practice; How Millions Have Been Healed by the Power of the Mind Alone by Albert Amao, PH.D.
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee by Bart D. Ehrman

Fall 2014
Embattled Saints: My Year with the Sufis of Afghanistan by Kenneth P. Lizzio
Sitting Still Like a Frog: Mindfulness Exercises for Kids (and Their Parents)  by Elone Snel
Doyle after Death by John Shirley
Isis in America: The Classic Eyewitness Account of Mme. Blavatsky’s Journey to America and the Occult Revolution She Ignited
Henry Steel Olcott

Summer 2014
The Forbidden Book: A Novel by Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro
God, Science and “The Secret Doctrine”: The Zero Point Metaphysics and Holographic Space of H.P. Blavatsky by
Christopher P. Holmes
Living the Season: Zen Practice for Transformative Times by Ji Hyang Padma
The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea by Joan E. Taylor

Spring 2014
The Esoteric Tarot: Ancient Sources Rediscovered in Hermeticism and Cabala by Ronald Decker
One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life by Mitch Horowitz
Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean by Amruta Patil

Winter 2014
Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities by Dean Radin
Finding the On-Ramp to Your Spiritual Path: A Road Map to Joy and Rejuvenation by Jan Phillips 
Dancing with Fire: A Mindful Way to Loving Relationships by John Amodeo
The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

Fall 2013
Radiance from Halcyon: A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science by Paul Eli Ivey
Handbook of the Theosophical Current  Edited by Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein
The Origins of the World’s Mythologies by E.J. Michael Witzel 

Summer 2013
The Power of the New Spirituality: How to Live a Life of Compassion and Personal Fulfillment  by William Bloom
The Hidden Geometry of Flowers: Living Rhythms, Form, and Number Keith Crichlow

Spring 2013
Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History by Richard Smoley
Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart D. Ehrman
Transformational Lessons from Oz by Jean Houston

Winter 2013
Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality by Gary Lachman
Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind by Margaret Placentra Johnston
Return to Redemption Ridge by George Eugene Belcher
Medieval Literacy: A Compendium of Medieval Knowledge with the Guidance of C.S. Lewis by James Grote

Fall 2012
The Modern Book of the Dead: A Revolutionary Perspective on Death, the Soul, and What Really Happens in the Life to Come by Ptolemy Tompkins
Initiating Women in Freemasonry: The Adoption Rite by Jan A.M. Snoek
Ancient Wisdom for a New Age: A Practical Guide for Spiritual Growth by Terry Hunt & Pal Benedict

Summer 2012
The Secret Tradition of the Soul by Patrick Harpur
Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas by Gary Lachman
Revelations: Vision, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels

Spring 2012
Just Trust Me: Finding the Truth in a World of Spinust Trust Me: Finding the Truth in a World of Spin by G. Randy Kasten
Art Magic by Emma Hardinge Britten, Edited and annotated by Marc Demarest
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by The Fourteenth Dalai Lama 

Winter 2012
Christian Gnosis by C. W. Leadbeater. Edited with a  foreward by Sten Von Krusensterna. intorduction and notes by Richard Smoley.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall

Fall 2011
Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology by  Yannis Toussulis
Sharing the Light: The Collected Articles of Geoffrey Hodson edited by John and Elizabeth Sell and Roselmo Z. Doval Santos
The Audible Life Stream: Ancient Secret of Dying While Living by Alistair Conwell
Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and Germanic Tribes by Hans-Peter Hasenfratz Translated by Michael Moynihan

Summer 2011
Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations by Joscelyn Godwin
Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia by Andrei Znamenski

Spring 2011
Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together by The Dalai Lama
The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff by Seymour B. Ginsburg
The Secret Doctrine Commentaries: The Unpublished 1889 Instructions [of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky]
Transcribed and annotated by Michael Gomes
Pavel Florensky, A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci by Avril Pyman

Winter 2011
“Freemasonry” and Ritual Work: Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner, vol. 265 by Rudol f Steiner, introduction by Christopher Bamford, translated by John Wood.
Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings by Gary Lachman
Thriving in the Crosscurrent: Clarity and Hope in a Time of Cultural Sea Change by Jim Kenney

Fall 2010
Consciousness from Zombies to Angels: The Shadow and the Light of Knowing Who You Are by Christian de Quincey
Echoes of the Orient: The Writings of William Quan Judge compiled by Dara Eklund
The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff by Seymour B. Ginsburg

Summer 2010
The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe by Richard Smoley
Crystal and Arabesque: Claude Bragdon, Ornament, and Modern Architecture by Jonathan Massey
The Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky by abridged and annotated by Michael Gomes
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by  Stephen T. Asma

Spring 2010
D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker produced by Roderick Bradford
The Lost Teachings of Lama Govinda: Living Wisdom from a Modern Tibetan Master
edited by Richard Power, foreword by Lama Surya Das

Winter 2010
A New Science of the Paranormal: The Promise of Psychical Research by Lawrence LeShan
The 2012 Story: The Myth, Fallacies, and Truth behind the Most Intriguing Date in History by John Major Jenkins

Fall 2009
The Light of the Russian Soul: A Personal Memoir of Early Russian Theosophy by Elena Fedorovna Pisareva
What is Hinduism? Modern Adventures into a Profound Global Faith by the editors of Hinduism Today
The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of the Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart by Joseph Chilton Pearce
My Journey in Mystic China: Old Pu's Travel Diary by John Blofeld

Summer 2009
A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese
The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life by Parker J. Palmer
The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims by F. E. Peters
On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism's Divine Feminine by Rabbi Léah Novick

Spring 2009
The Majesty of Your Loving: A Couple's Journey through Alzheimer's by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle
Rapture for the Geeks: When AI Outsmarts IQ by  Richard Dooling
The Kingdom of Agarttha: A Journey into the Hollow Earth by the Marquis Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre

Winter 2009
Into Great Silence DVD. Zeitgeist Films
Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen by Gary Lachman
Letters from a Sufi Teacher by Shaikh Sharfuddin Maneri
A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese

November/December 2008
Grammar for the Soul: Using Language for Personal Change by Lawrence A. Weinstein
Buddhist Goddesses of India by Miranda Shaw
Het Web der Schepping: Theosofie en Kunst in Nederland van Lauweriks tot Mondrian [The Web of Creation: Theosophy and Art in the Netherlands from Lauweriks to Mondrian] by Marty Bax
Transforming Fate into Destiny: A New Dialogue with Your Soul by Robert Ohotto

September/October 2008
The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual and Social Harmony by Will Tuttle
Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity by Richard Smoley

July/August 2008
American Shamans: Journeys with Traditional Healers by Jack Montgomery
Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall by Amy Chua
Saving Angel by Charlotte Fielden

May/June 2008
Modern Physics and Ancient Faith by Stephen M. Barr
Reflections Along the Path by Robert Bonnell
Into the Interior: Discovering Swedenborg by Gary Lachman

March/April 2008
The Taliesin Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman
Nicholas and Helena Roerich: The Spiritual Journey of Two Great Artists and Peacemakers by Ruth A. Drayer

January/February 2008
Chartres: Sacred Geometry, Sacred Space by Gordon Strachan
Kindness, Clarity and Insight, the 25th Anniversary Edition By the Dalai Lama
Esoteric Christianity by Annie Besant
Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives by Dr. Jim B. Tucker

---