It's pretty usual nowadays to affirm that every one of us is psychic and capable of experiencing the paranormal – to a lesser or greater degree, of course. But if you accept that the psychic faculty is latent in you, how can it be brought out? Why should the distractions of everyday life exclude you from fulfilling your psychic potential?

    Who better to answer your questions than US psychic detective Noreen Renier? She was the first psychic to work with the FBI, and one of the few psychics to have lectured at the FBI Academy. She has more than 30 years' experience of working with law enforcement agencies across the USA and overseas, and has been called in on more than 600 criminal cases.

    Few of us, perhaps, would want to turn psychic to investigate crime, but the gifts our intuition offers – foresight, insight, knowing and awareness – can be used in countless other ways if we learn to use our brains in a different manner, says Renier, 'to explore its vast areas on untapped potential'. Psychic criminology, health diagnosis and finding missing people or objects are some of the applications discussed, as she explains how we can develop powers of telepathy, psychometry, remote viewing, dreaming and even dowsing. Visualisation, memory recall and meditation are vital aids to psychic power, she says, and ways of maximising their efficacy are described.

    The book has a neighbourly tone and lives up to the 'no nonsense' claim of the sub-title. It sets out numerous ways in which psychic abilities can be developed, with routes to suit everybody. The approach reflects Renier's belief that development of the mind's capabilities is essential to the improvement of our lives and of the world, and so more people are needed to explore the psychic path.

 

Experiencing synchronicity positions us tantalisingly at a gateway to the hidden intelligence that orders the universe and envelops 'the paranormal' but which actually points the way to a higher consciousness which would allow us to perceive dimensions of existence other than everyday 'reality'.
    Synchronicity enabling contact with the 'afterlife' is the theme of this intriguing handbook from novelists Rob MacGregor (author of seven original Indiana Jones novels) and Trish MacGregor, who as a team have also written books on dreams, astrology, yoga, the Tarot, divination and animal symbolism. Their long-time interest in synchronicity led to their 2010 book The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity.

    Their books on synchronicity developed from an experimental blog started in 2009, using Carl Jung's term to describe events connected by time and meaning, but not by cause and effect. Such events have no 'normal' or physical causes, so it's thought their provenance is paranormal. It seemed to Jung that synchronicity represented a 'direct act of creation' manifesting itself as chance. For synchronicity to occur, the spaces between individuals and things, rather than being empty, must somehow allow a connecting link or themselves be a transmitting medium. Jung, of course, saw the collective unconscious as this medium; today, consciousness is strongly mooted by various physicists.

 

Hypnotherapist Hudson has written a carefully researched and closely considered book which makes a refreshing change from the usual dream interpretation works one usually encounters.

    A serious study which brings to bear both learning and insight, the book is partly a guide to symbolism, dealing with possible meanings of dream images, and partly a workbook suggesting the best ways to recall, interpret and relate to your dreams and, most important, letting you 'fill in the blanks' for personal and deepened reflection.

    A former psychology professor, Dr Hudson is a member of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and draws on the collective wisdom of the great explorers of dreams, Freud, Jung, Assagioli, Maslow and Cayce. Interestingly, Dr Hudson opts for Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs' system, used widely in psychology, education, business and medicine, in assisting dream interpretation – a humanistic and existential approach extending from basic bodily needs to the transpersonal.

    After all, in evolutionary terms, dreams have always been integral to the fulfilment of human potential, indicating in particular neglected areas which hold back the development of the personality. Thus, learning to sound the 'wondrous inner source of wisdom' of dreams is one of the greatest gifts you can bestow upon yourself, Dr Hudson says. To this end, she has sensibly decided she must help the individual to understand what the dream means for him or her, instead of producing yet another dream dictionary with generalised solutions.

    She offers an invaluable guide to still unmapped territory, providing essential pointers to explaining how the unconscious tries out possibilities the future might hold in store for us, and a detailed key to understanding the enigmatic language of dream symbolism.

 

For Bernardo Kastrup – surely one of the most interesting thinkers writing today – the most pressing question is: what is the true nature of reality?

    I found his previous book, Rationalist Spirituality, a remarkable read. In it, he set out the case for understanding consciousness as a non-local field phenomenon linked to the brain, and for accepting that all universal knowledge is, in principle, accessible to us. It is the local attention filters of the nervous system, evolved through now defunct survival advantages, which thwart us from accessing this 'universal repository of knowledge'. In the new book, Kastrup considers how we can bypass these filters, following the intuition that our thoughts create our own reality.

    Science seemed to offer Kastrup the best way of finding out but, after several years, he realised its limitations. Instead, there was abundant evidence that, through meditation, yoga, hypnosis, prayer, lucid dreaming, shamanic rituals, sensory and sleep deprivation, fasting or other ordeals, people throughout history had 'perturbed their evolved brain filters' and temporarily tapped into a universal source of direct knowledge.

    Thus Kastrup conducts four different experiments, on himself, into altered, or non-ordinary, states of consciousness, and takes a chapter each to describe what happened. He does not reveal how he induced these states, and we are left to ponder. However, the implication of the transcendence of object-subject duality in the 'inner theatre' of these experiences, he contends, is that the very substance of its reality is pure thought. Moreover, that thought patterns are the underlying building blocks of everything experienced, that matter and energy are themselves but patterns of thought.

    Just as dreams seem to spring spontaneously from the psyche, he says, ultimate reality could be an externalisation of the unconscious dreams of all of us, interweaving as they are projected on to the fabric of space-time.

    Kastrup, who lives in Holland, has a PhD in computer engineering and has worked as a scientist in foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories. He has written many scientific papers, founded two high-tech businesses, and today is an executive of a technology company.

 

Questions such as 'what is consciousness?', and 'what does it do?' remain unanswerable, and are likely to remain so for a while yet. The 'last great mystery of science' – how to account for the existence and nature of consciousness – has become the subject of heated debate between biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers.

    Psychiatrist Chris Nunn, who has researched mind/body relationships and has been involved in consciousness studies for 20 years, is well placed to survey the scene. His view is that as far as 'mind' is concerned we need to take into account, as well as neurology, genetic, environmental and social factors. Close connections hold sway between experience, memory and personhood.

    He warns that the currently popular field theories of conscious have a 'somewhat wacky, New Age reputation', but admits they have a very long history, especially in Eastern cultures, and have attracted the attention of esteemed Western thinkers, including Alfred North Whitehead and, more recently, Erwin Laszlo with his Akashic field ideas. But it is not clear how consciousness arises under these non-local field theories for, as far as we can see, says Nunn, consciousness is somehow linked to brains. If one wants to consider field theories he feels they must be strictly local to the brain or start off local.

    His book takes a level-headed look at near-death, out-of-the-body and mystical experiences, as well as other altered states of consciousness, including those induced by ayahuasca and other 'theogens'. Such experiences appear to be 'potentialities' in all human consciousness and could be useful pointers to its nature. Yet what comes out strongly in Nunn's study is that we are not going to properly understand our everyday conscious experience, or the true nature of our selves for that matter, until physicists have achieved a deeper understanding of time. This is because, for one thing, paradoxically, tests have shown that the brain processes the planning of an action more than one-third of a second before the person actually has a conscious desire to act. In terms of activity in the brain, this is an extremely long time.

    The title of the book, puzzling at first glance (as is the cover image), refers to Winifred Coombe-Tennant, a Welsh suffragette, politician, philanthropist and patron of the arts who, a century ago, used the pseudonym Mrs Willett to conceal her mediumistic activities and involvement in spiritualism. Nunn uses this well-documented case to illustrate issues to do with the stability and boundaries of conscious selves, and the nature of time. Deceased luminaries of the Society for Psychical Research – its key founders, in fact, Frederic Myers, Edmund Gurney and Henry Sidgwick – made copious contact with Mrs Willett from beyond the grave, so it was said.

    Despite the colourful Willett tale, this is a book mainly for an academic readership, although the general reader with an interest in science and the fascinating question of consciousness will also find it stimulating.

 

 

It is to Terry Welbourn's everlasting kudos that he has produced the first life of T C (Tom) Lethbridge, a biography long overdue for one of the most intriguing minds of the 20th century.

    Lethbridge (1901-1971) was a unique character who is now something of a cult figure and whose ahead-of-his-time influence has been wide-ranging, if often unacknowledged. So this biography is a must-read for anyone interested in investigations into consciousness and, especially, of the paranormal.

     Lethbridge held the honorary position of Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities in the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge for more than 30 years, but was not a typical archaeologist. On the contrary. He berated archaeologist colleagues for having no imagination and being interested only in dates and where artefacts originated. He quite happily investiugated ghosts, witches, extra-sensory perception, divination, dreams and precognition. He asserted: 'What is magic today will be science tomorrow.'
    In later life, Lethbridge, archaeologist, Arctic explorer, sailor, painter and pioneering dowser as well as an indefatigable investigator of the paranormal, famously said: 'From a three-dimensional world I seem to have fallen through into one where there are more dimensions.'

    His key ideas that ghosts are pictures produced by the mind, that our general concept of time is wrong, and that magic, in the traditional sense, is the application of resonance, being the interconnection of all things – plus his belief that every inanimate object has the ability to store information and somehow capture its history within itself – find parallels today in various cutting-edge fields of science, including physics, biology and consciousness studies.

    Colin Wilson, who has written a foreword for the biography, did much to bring Lethbridge to a wider public sensibility when he devoted 125 pages to his life story in Mysteries (1978). Wilson wrote that Lethbridge was the only investigator in the 20th century 'to produce a comprehensive and convincing theory of the paranormal'. It is in this field that Lethbridge remains best known, rather than for his archaeology and Arctic sea voyages.

 

Here's an unusual book that will surely delight the intrepid antiquarian, the 'earth mysteries' devotee – or anyone fascinated by the myth and legend of England and our age-old relationship with rocks, whether standing stones, cliffs, caves or towering outcrops.

    Chancing upon a packet of long-forgotten postcards after a house-move led to Jerry Bird's brainwave for this quirky and captivating book. The cards, found at second-hand shops, antique fairs and car-boot sales over a number of years, reflected his passion for folklore and ancient sites. Only a few of the cards, mostly dating from the picture postcard's 'golden age' – the time just before World War One – featured prehistoric monuments, among them, as you might expect, Stonehenge and Avebury, but also Castlerigg in Cumbria, for example.

    It occurred to Jerry that, as well as hunting out more megaliths, it would be a good idea if the collection also included natural landscape features, such as the dramatic tors of Devon and Cornwall and the brooding caves and crags of the Pennines. Deciding to 'get stoned', as it were, internet auction sites gave Jerry the means of expanding on his theme.

    One stand-out postcard (featured on the front cover of the book) shows three likely lads in bowler hats and waistcoats lolling about the Kits Coty House cromlech near Maidstone in Kent, while another depicts a couple of engaging old gaffers with pails by the Bulmer's Stone at the village street at Darlington, Durham. Most of the photos on the cards, however, such as the one of the Hellstones dolmen in Dorset (pictured below), are without human companions. Jerry concentrates on England, he says, because that's where his main interests lie, and also understandably, 'because one has to stop somewhere'.
     Naturally, some of the locations in the book are extremely well known, but others are not, and it these which still entice with the prospect of exploration. It's fascinating to see how many Stone Age sites made it on to postcards a hundred and more years ago, showing how such haunting and evocative places have long captured the imagination – they still do so today, of course (otherwise, we wouldn't have the pleasure of this book, for one thing).

    The stones are categorized cutely under various headings indicating how our forefathers saw these strangely alluring and mystifying places and the kinds of associations they made with the distant past: Druids, The Old Gods, Giants, The Devil, Ghosts and Faeries, Stones That Move, Healing and Wishing, Robin Hood and King Arthur, to mention just some of them. Each page has a full-size reproduction of the original postcard together with Jerry's entertaining commentary showing his wide knowledge of English myth and folklore – and there's the bonus of map references and directions.

    Jerry, a writer and musician who lives in Dorset, says: 'The type of sites here largely reflect my interest in our pagan heritage, and ancient stones and rocks, whether megalithic sites or natural outcrops, have always held a strong fascination for those who seek to reconnect with ancestral sacred places.' Jerry has edited, and been the prime contributor to Merry Meet magazine, a journal of folklore and paganism, since its inception in 1999. His first book, Landscapes of Memory, a compilation of essays on English folklore, was published by Green Magic in 2009.

 

Referring to the coming astrological Age of Aquarius, the 'New Age' movement has swept the globe, and Dr Drury's book remains a cogent, educative and eminently readable overview of the central themes that unite the 'alternative' community in a spiritual drive.

    I say 'remains' because Wisdom Seekers, in essence, is a paperback reprint under a new title of Drury's The New Age: Searching for the Spiritual Self of 2004 - but without the lavish colour illustrations and 'coffee table' approach of its predecessor volume. Nevertheless, this is a seminal work and, with its balanced explication of the New Age, this fresh edition should attract a new readership interested in how the movement came about and where it might be heading - Drury's take on it is that it may well presage the future of Western religious experience.

    With the jettison of formal religious doctrines, it would embrace transformative spiritual practices founded in the ancient wisdom traditions of East and West, the emphasis being on personal spiritual awakening. Certainly, it has always seemed to me that it is the spiritual quest that lies behind the New Age phenomenon in all of its many manifestations.

    Drury reports on its origins and founding figures, the impact of metaphysical thinkers Swedenborg, Mesmer, Madame Blavatsky and Gurdjieff, and psychologists William James, Freud, Jung and Adler, as well as the influence of (in particular) Indian spiritual traditions.
    Wisdom Seekers also considers how the New Age has absorbed the latest ideas of quantum physics and consciousness studies, although this section of the book could have been updated to take account of perspectives which have surfaced prominently since 2004 - for example, the Akashic field premise of Erwin Laszlo or the 'monistic idealism' of Ami Goswami. Likewise, there is no comment on the burgeoning 'golden age' element within the New Age movement which fosters alternative archaeology and the rediscovery of the lost science and wisdom of the ancient megalithic cultures.

    However, Drury, a British-born anthropologist who has spent most of his life in Australia, is the author of more than 60 books, including Magic and Witchcraft: From Shamanism to the Technopagans, The Dictionary of the Esoteric, and The Shaman's Quest, and his credentials in the field are well-established.

 

 

Transformation is the key word in these two new books, as you can see from their sub-titles, and their themes are indeed complementary.

    I've often noticed how tragedy, health breakdown or other crisis in someone's life can engender a sudden 'waking up' to meaning, to beauty and cosmic 'oneness', or open up a path to spiritual discovery. 
    Out of the Darkness, by Steve Taylor, a British psychology lecturer and researcher in transpersonal psychology, investigates this interesting phenomenon, and affords us an important insight into the functions of the human psyche. He has collected moving and inspirational stories from more than 30 people who have undergone lasting and uplifting psychological change following times of intense trauma and chaos in their lives.

    Taylor reveals how, after receiving horrific injuries or suffering life-threatening diseases, to striking rock-bottom through addiction, these individuals have all moved into 'a state of appreciation, connection and intense well-being'. They include Dr Gill Hicks who sustained terrible injuries in the July 7, 2007, London terrorist bombings; the American author Michael Hutchinson who lapsed into depression after he was paralysed in a fall; Carrie Mitchell. a writer for the UK TV series Emmerdale, who developed cancer; and Glyn Hood, from the north-east of England, who had a life-changing experience after her daughter died.

    Several spiritual teachers, including Eckhart Tolle and Catherine Ingram, who describe their awakenings after severe psychological turmoil, are also interviewed.

    An explanation as to why crisis can have an epiphanic effect is offered by Taylor. He thinks that stress and anxiety over extended periods can result in the normal structure of the psyche dissolving, permitting a new self to emerge. But of more importance, it allows psychological attachments to be severed which, through acceptance, has a liberating effect and moves the individual to a higher state of being. Taylor shows how people can draw on an almost endless resolve to enable them to overcome suffering. One crucial inference to be drawn from his book is that as long as we are courageous enough to confront and accept the most challenging of situations, there is little for us to fear in the unknown – another is that transcendent experience is only ever a whisper away.

    A story that would have been appropriate for Out of the Darkness is that of Dr Melissa Lowe, whose book title – it 'fits the times in which we live', she says - would have made a useful phrase for Taylor.

    Founded on the psychology of Carl Jung and the philosophy of the East, her book draws on her own harrowing experience – the collapse of her marriage – and her subsequent transformation to demonstrate the need for 'post-ego development', which she describes as the integration of consciousness. 'Apocalypse', in the original Greek, means to uncover, or reveal; Dr Lowe advocates Integrative Consciousness as a process that reveals how to live in stillness, in the full awareness of the moment, 'without the distractions that life offers up to keep us from becoming so fearful that we topple into insanity'.

    She had a high-powered job as a systems analyst with a major US communications company, but felt unfulfilled and empty. One day on a business trip to Las Vegas, fate led her to a bookshop where she chanced upon Joy's Way by Dr Brugh Joy, a physician, healer and philosopher who had rebelled against traditional medicine – her life was changed by practising the 'heart-centred awareness' he described.

    Although Dr Lowe was in 'Sin City' at the moment her 'spiritual and physical awakening' began, it was her husband who was cheating on her at home. Devastated by the upheaval in her marriage, and subsequent legal divorce proceedings, it wasn't until after she had opted for the unusual course of staging her own symbolic 'divorce ceremony', or ritual, that she escaped despair and felt free, light-hearted and ready to start her life over.

    That happened in the 1980s. Today, Dr Lowe has more than 30 years of consciousness studies to her credit, helping people to understand the dynamics of their limiting unconscious and transform themselves, their organizations and their communities, too. Writing with sagacity and empathy, her book combines the profound resources of Jung and Eastern thought to formulate a guide to positive consciousness transformation which is both existentially and spiritually satisfying.

 

 

The trouble with the atheist position is that it is nihilistic, and offers no concept of humanity other than the material: no God, no separate soul. Somehow we have to locate a synthesis of faith and atheism, says Crocker, a meaningful understanding of who we are, as beings who are obviously aware of meaning.

    He thinks that a solution lies in the acceptance of myth, with a consequent return to virtue. Myths can put across great moral aspirations and hope and so have a potentially enormous for us, while belief in the literal event has no significance whatsoever, cannot pass the 'so what?' test, and is essentially meaningless, he says. Religion interpreted as myth, however, lights up a path.

    Of course, exploring the myths that touch us most deeply is a central Jungian idea; they enrich our voyages through life and make them more meaningful. Looking at life metaphorically, and celebrating myths as if they were alive in us, allows a richer knowledge of ourselves. Myth, which clearly has a spiritual aspect, speaks of another dimension that exists alongside our own world, and in some way supports it; consciousness itself can be seen as mytho-poetic.

    Myth is more powerful than doctrine because it has greater implication. If we were to 'enthrone justice as god', we would have a guiding principle for a peaceful fulfilled life, and our lives and the world would be the better for it. Crucially, Crocker demonstrates that myth and critical thinking need not be mutually exclusive terms.

    Such a synthesis as he envisages would require the church to alter completely its emphasis and pre-conditions in order to change its attitude from that of master to servant, something which, historically, it has shown it is not equipped to do.

    For tendering a rejuvenating philosophy for our troubled times, Crocker must be applauded. Optimistically, also, he sets out a means of bridging the divide in the 'God debate', notwithstanding that atheism is taken as the default position requiring no defence. Many who subscribe to a holistic spirituality will join him in his hope for the substitution of an endogenous divine for an exogenous God. The problem is not access for God believers, but for those who simply cannot believe in God. Yet theirs may still be 'the myth kingdom of justice, of love, of mercy, of comfort, of a restored soul, of an overflowing life, of purity of heart'.

    I concur with Crocker that divine values can be grasped without any belief in God; if non-believers, we can still be disciples of values.

 

 

Beyond Humanity? The Ethics of Biomedical Enhancement

Allen Buchanan

Oxford University Press £20

 

To the extent that such interventions are available, and others are imminent, a biopolitics of biomedical enhancement is opening up, with a fault-line appearing between pro-enhancement and anti-enhancement groups.

    On the one hand there are the transhumanists who believe a wide variety of enhancements should be developed and people should be free to transform themselves if they wish and, on the other, the bioconservatives who believe we should not substantially alter human biology or the 'human condition'.

    The differences between the two factions are easily exaggerated. Both sides share the moral imperative of being 'authentic' to oneself, although differing in how they understand authenticity. The moral ideal of authenticity, which emerged fully at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, is that each of us finds our own way of being in the world, of being true to oneself, a long-standing existential issue. Is it possible to undergo enhancement and remain 'true to oneself'?

    Other key question arises from the double meaning of the title of this timely and cogent work implies (with the all-important question mark): are we looking to surpass the human race as we know it and, in doing so, leave behind our cherished virtues of compassion and benevolence?

    Are we good enough as sentient organisms and, if not, how might we improve ourselves? Do we have to restrict ourselves to traditional methods such as study and training, or should we also use science to enhance our mental and physical capacities more directly?    Biotechnologies on the horizon will enable us to be smarter, have better memories, be stronger and quicker, have more stamina, live longer, be more resistant to diseases, and enjoy richer emotional lives.

   Drugs being developed to aid Alzheimer's disease sufferers, for example, promise improved memory function, but are reported to aid the memory of healthy people, too, suggesting that we may be approaching a period of cosmetic neurology when 'brain-lifts' are possible.

    In tackling such issues head-on, Buchanan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, calls for the debate about human enhancement to be informed by a proper understanding of evolutionary biology and how it has undermined simplistic conceptions of human nature deployed by opponents of enhancement. He argues that there are powerful reasons for us to embark on the enhancement enterprise, and that no objections to enhancement are sufficient to outweigh them.

    Buchanan acknowledges that, over the last decade, enhancement has grown into a major topic of debate in applied ethics, interest having been stimulated by advances in biomedical science which, to many, suggest that it will become increasingly possible to use medicine and technology to reshape and manipulate aspects of human biology, even (perhaps especially) in healthy individuals.

    Enduring questions about what it is to be human, about individuality, about our relationship to nature, and about what kind of society we should endeavour to create, are raised by the debate, which is one of the most difficult in bioethics today because the border between therapy and enhancement is so indeterminate as to be almost invisible.

    In areas of medicine as diverse as reconstructive surgery, psychopharmacology, genetic screening and hormone replacement, some uses of biomedical technology seem to be genuine treatments of disease while others appear as frivolous lifestyle modifications or even luxury consumer items.

 

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