Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Graham Nicholls, author of Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience. This month, as the field of parapsychology turns 130 years old, I look back its influence on me and the wider implications of the field for our understanding of reality. As a young teenager, the works of Janet Lee Mitchell, D. Scot Rogo, Charles Tart, and J. B. Rhine (one of the most important researchers of our time) all gave me a sense of the importance of this field. This wasn't because they were simply confirming beliefs that I already held (I was always suspicious of believing too much) but because psychology could offer a piece of the puzzle to help me understand what was

Popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan, the actual source of the quote I used to title this post may be from Marcello Truzzi, a co-founder of the debunking group called CISCOP. The concept, however, goes back to people such as the French astronomer Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace —usually just called "Laplace"— (""The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness") or even Scottish philosopher David Hume ("A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence"). It seems so reasonable. The question, however, is should we accept it as valid? The people at SCEPCOP point out that no matter how reasonable it seems, the debunkers or

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Richard Webster, author of more than seventy-five books, including Astral Travel for Beginners. A few weeks ago, I met a man who told me he’d been interested in astral travel for many years, but had never managed to leave his physical body.  I was puzzled, as, over the years, I’ve helped many people astral travel.  Some have been able to astral travel immediately, while others have taken weeks or even months.  However, this was the first time I’d met someone who’d apparently tried for years without success. After chatting with him for a while, I realized why he had not been successful.  The most important factor in his lack of

Our ordinary experience and our education has led us to believe that the only substance is physical, but both the ancient wisdom and modern quantum science say that everything that exists has substance. We must accept this principle and realize that even thoughts and feeling are “substantial”—consisting of substance. These are not physical substance but astral and mental substance. When metaphysicians and psychics, and even a growing number of parapsychologists and other scientists, speak of planes or worlds—physical/etheric, astral, mental, and spiritual—they are recognizing the existence of different kinds of substance. These substances are distinguished by distinct ranges