Author: Sudhir Kakar
Jeffrey J Kripal/Several Contributors
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Year: 2012
Language: English
Pages: 310
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780670084654
Description
Accessibly written essays on a baffling subject by the most eminent scholars in the field.
Despite being sullied by frauds and dismissed by sceptics, the paranormal has exerted a strange fascination over humankind for centuries.
In Seriously Strange, the second volume in the Boundaries of Consciousness series edited by Sudhir Kakar and Jeffrey D. Kripal, a group of nine intellectuals come together to shed light on some of the most baffling experiences on record psychical experiences.
Through these illuminating essays, they tell us how such extraordinary events can be decoded and interpreted to become the object of rigorous scientific study.
The range is wide: from essays that reveal how Freud and Jung engaged with the notion of the paranormal to a provocative and humorous memoir of a physicist who spent over a decade running a secret psychic spying programme for the US government during the Cold War; from heartfelt accounts by practising psychiatrists who recount the dramatic effects of the anomalous in their healing practice to a learned call for the renewal of professional parapsychology in the light of Patanjalis Yoga-sutras.
By telling their own stories and exploring some of the implications of their work, these men and women map the mind-bending geography of the human psyche and the spectrum of experiences love and death, desire and sex, hurt and healing, myth and magic that influence it.
Contents
Foreword to the Series “Boundaries of Consciousness”
Introduction : Thinking anew about psychical experiences
1. Anomalous Phenomena, Synchronicity and the Re-Sacralization of the Modern World by Roderick Main
2. Psychoanalysis, Resistance and Telepathy : The case of Ted Stories by Mikita Brottman
3. From Physicalism to Realist Idealism : My Engagement with psychical research by Edward F. Kelly
4. PsiSpy : Recollections from a Psychic spying programme by Edwin C. May
5. Psi and Psychiatry : The Quest for a New Scientific Paradigm by Diane Hennacy Powell
6. Anomalous Moments in Psychotherapy : Three Clinical Stories by James W. Lomax
7. Parapsychology and Yoga, Theory and Practice by K. Ramakrishna Rao
8. Seeing and Not Seeing Eternity by Dean Radin
9. The Paranormality of Everyday Life : Childhood, Mysticism, Madness by Jeremy Biles
Notes
Notes on the Contributors