Welcome to the Heaven Connect Blog – your space for profound insights into the world of mediumship. We bridge the gap between deep practical experience and current findings from science and research. From tips for your first mediumship reading to analyses of near-death and consciousness research, through to the portrayal of mediumship in modern pop culture: Find inspiration and knowledge for your own journey between the worlds.
The out-of-body experience (OBE) as a phenomenon – described before it is interpreted (the question of proof is in the astral-travel article). What is experienced: the separation, the external vantage point onto one's own body, a wide-awake, "more real than real" clarity, mostly peaceful. Who has it: about 10% of the general population, more in student samples (Celia Green 1968), psychologically healthy (Gabbard & Twemlow, "With the Eyes of the Mind", 1984, 339 cases). When it occurs: in the transition to sleep, in sleep paralysis, in mortal danger, under anaesthesia, in cardiac arrest. Plus the clean distinctions from lucid dreams, sleep paralysis (~7.6% lifetime) and the autoscopic phenomena of neurology (Blanke & Mohr 2005) – and the OBE as the core of the near-death experience.
What is astral travel – and can the "journey" be tested? The distinction between out-of-body experience (OBE, the established experience) and the metaphysical interpretation (a travelling "astral body", the open question). The tradition from Theosophy through Muldoon to Robert Monroe and Brazilian projectiology – and above all the concrete experiments: Tart's "Miss Z" (1968, number 25132, four nights) with its criticism (clock reflection, no video, Gardner), Ingo Swann at the ASPR (8/8, the origin of remote viewing), Blue Harary's kitten "Spirit", Blanke's brain stimulation (Nature 2002) and Blackmore's psychological theory. The designated hard test – the AWARE study's shelf targets – effectively never ran (too few prepared rooms, missed/late interviews), so it is a failure of the study and not a null result; the question is kept open by veridical perception, not by tradition.
Since 2021 a declassified CIA document has gone viral, supposedly "proving" astral travel. What it actually says: in 1983 Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell assessed the Monroe Institute's Hemi-Sync program (Robert Monroe, "Journeys Out of the Body", Focus 10/12/15/21) and explained out-of-body experiences via the holographic universe of Itzhak Bentov, David Bohm and Karl Pribram. Plus the legendary "missing page 25" (a microfilming error, not a cover-up), the link to the Stargate program and Remote Viewer 001 Joseph McMoneagle – and an honest appraisal between binaural beats, the neuroscience of the OBE (temporoparietal junction) and veridical perception as the real test.
Shortly before death many people report seeing already-deceased loved ones who come to "fetch" them – comforting, distinct from delirium, and different from a near-death experience (here the dying person themselves is observed). The strand runs from William Barrett's founding work "Death-Bed Visions" (1926) with the classic case of the dying Doris, who saw her sister Vida – dead three weeks, but kept secret from her – through the large cross-cultural survey by Osis & Haraldsson ("At the Hour of Death", 1977, US + northern India, ~10,000 questionnaires) to Christopher Kerr's prospective hospice studies (50–60% of conscious dying patients). The evidential core is the "Peak in Darien" cases: the dying name someone whose death they could not have known of – like the child in Kübler-Ross's interview who saw her brother Peter, killed minutes earlier, "waiting". Weighed honestly against the counter-side (dying brain, medication, wishful thinking, retrospective) and linked with Kübler-Ross, veridical perception, the receiver model and palliative training.
In 2017 the neurologist Wilfried Kuhn observed that near-death experiences are "definitely not" taught at medical faculties – and that still holds. Yet it is not a metaphysical problem but a clinical one: 10–20% of resuscitated patients and about 15% of long-ventilated ICU survivors report NDEs; 50–60% of conscious hospice patients have end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs), mostly comforting and clearly distinct from delirium. Dismissing or pathologising them demonstrably causes distress and destroys trust; comforting visions get sedated away as delirium; the distressing cases (~5%) are misread as psychosis. The key move: you need not regard NDEs as paranormal to demand that doctors handle them competently – and the bar is low: they would only need to recognise such cases, not shut them down, and refer them (triage competence, IANDS, chaplaincy). Why this is the least controversial, most feasible reform in the field. With the Greyson/Pehlivanova survey (2024) and links to Kuhn, the receiver model and the sociology of science.
Perhaps the most puzzling strand of near-death research: people blind from birth, who have never processed an image, report after a near-death experience that they "saw". Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper gathered the cases in "Mindsight" (1999) – among them Vicki Umipeg, whose optic nerve was destroyed in the incubator ("No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever"), who saw her body, her wedding ring and the doctors "from above", and Brad Barrows, who at age eight, in cardiac arrest, saw his blind roommate go for help (later confirmed). 31 blind subjects, 14 of them blind from birth, about 80% reporting visual impressions. Crucially, Ring expressly calls it "mindsight" – a multisensory awareness, not ordinary vision. Weighed honestly against the strong counter-side (Keith Augustine: retrospective, anecdotal, unreplicated) – why that is exactly what makes the debate so compelling and where the real proof is still missing. With links to Sabom, van Lommel, Holden and the receiver model.
No modern near-death case is better known – and none has been attacked more fiercely. The neurosurgeon Eben Alexander (who taught for a time at Harvard Medical School) falls into a seven-day coma in 2008 from rare gram-negative E. coli meningitis and lives through an overwhelming journey: the murky "earthworm" realm, the blossoming Gateway valley, the woman on the butterfly wing with her message ("You are loved … you have nothing to fear") and the "Core" with its "Om". His "Proof of Heaven" (2012) becomes a worldwide bestseller – carried by a strong argument: his neocortex was shut down, so the experience cannot be a product of the brain. But Luke Dittrich's Esquire investigation (2013) disputes the central premise (the coma was medically induced, per ER physician Laura Potter), and Sam Harris calls the argument "alarmingly unscientific" (no fMRI/PET/EEG functional data); Oliver Sacks points to the cortex coming back online. An honest weighing in both directions – why the case cannot bear the "proof" claim and where the real evidential weight lies (Sabom, van Lommel, Holden, veridical perception).
Unlike most NDE pioneers, Michael Sabom was a sceptic: the cardiologist (Emory University) set out to refute Raymond Moody's "Life After Life" and launched a five-year study of more than a hundred resuscitated patients – which changed his mind. His methodological stroke of genius in "Recollections of Death" (1982) was the control group: cardiac patients without an NDE were asked to describe a resuscitation – every account contained major errors, while the NDErs who had watched their own resuscitation "from above" described it accurately (26 of 32 autoscopic cases on target, the remaining six highly precise against confidential records). This counts as the first hard evidence of veridical perception – the blueprint for Holden, van Lommel and Greyson. "Light and Death" (1998) brought the Atlanta Study (160 patients, 47 NDEs) and the Pam Reynolds case – along with a conservative Christian turn and the famous feud with Kenneth Ring ("Religious Wars in the NDE Movement", 2000). Why the NDE field, too, has its camps and dogmas – symmetry in both directions.
Most elements of a near-death experience are inner experiences and cannot be checked from outside – but one can: veridical perception, where people accurately perceive, during a documented cardiac arrest, things they could not have perceived. Six concrete cases, honest about strengths and weaknesses: Pam Reynolds and the bone saw (Sabom, "standstill" surgery), Maria's tennis shoe on the ledge (Seattle 1977 – striking, but only one witness; sceptical re-examination Ebbern & Mulligan 1996), the man with the dentures (van Lommel, Lancet 2001 – documented at the time by nursing staff), AWARE's "Mr A" (Parnia 2014 – one verified case, but the hidden images produced no hit), Al Sullivan and the "flapping" surgeon, and people born blind who "see" (Ring & Cooper, Mindsight). From the single case to the number: Janice Holden's tally of over a hundred cases (about 92% accurate). With the honest counter-side (Keith Augustine; the negative prospective test) and the question of where consciousness "resides" when the brain has failed.
"Three out of four call white black when the group does – humans are sheep." That is how Solomon Asch's line experiment (1951) appears in the textbook – inverting what Asch himself emphasised. The setup (unambiguous line task, control error below 1%, 12 of 18 critical trials with a unanimously wrong majority), the famous figure (37% conforming judgements, three in four at least once) – but also the forgotten one: on about two thirds of the trials people stayed independent, a quarter never went along. A textbook survey (Friend, Rafferty & Bramel 1990) shows the independence was quietly dropped; Asch was struck by the resistance. With the decisive variations – a single ally cuts conformity by about three quarters (and it need not be the correct answer: unanimity matters more than group size) –, the normative vs. informational distinction (most knew the group was wrong and admitted it privately), the context dependence (Bond & Smith; Perrin & Spencer) and the real, encouraging lesson. Linked to Milgram, Stanford, Arendt and Bonhoeffer – and to the broader herd-behaviour overview.
"Put good people into a bad role, and they turn bad" – the lesson from Philip Zimbardo's prison experiment (Stanford, 1971) is in every textbook. 24 students screened as healthy were split by coin toss into "guards" and "prisoners"; after six of the planned fourteen days it was called off, because the guards seemed cruel and the prisoners broken. From this came Zimbardo's "Lucifer Effect" and the line to Abu Ghraib. But the finding does not survive scrutiny: Thibault Le Texier's archival work (Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment, American Psychologist 2019) shows the guards were explicitly coached toward brutality; the famous breakdown of "prisoner" Douglas Korpi was, by his own account, faked (Ben Blum, The Lifespan of a Lie, 2018); the most brutal guard consciously played a role; and methodologically there was neither a control group nor a real hypothesis test. The counter-test – Reicher & Haslam's BBC Prison Study (2006) – found the opposite: no automatic role conformity, what matters is shared identity. With Zimbardo's rebuttal, the link to Milgram, Arendt and Bonhoeffer, and the meta-lesson of why even a comfortable, canonical finding can be a myth.
"65% go all the way to 450 volts – humans obey blindly." Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment (Yale, from 1961, inspired by the Eichmann trial) appears like this in every textbook – half true, half myth. The setup (teacher, learner, experimenter, generator up to 450 V, the four "prods"), the famous baseline (26 of 40) – and above all the roughly two dozen variations in which obedience collapses: victim in the same room 40%, touch proximity 30%, run-down office instead of Yale 47.5%, experimenter only on the phone ~21%, two rebelling peers 10%. Obedience is thus not a constant but situational. Plus Gina Perry's archival critique (improvised prods, sceptical subjects – those who believed in real harm obeyed less; poor debriefing), Haslam & Reicher's "engaged followership" (the only genuine order, the fourth prod, worked worst – not submission but identification with the "good cause of science") and the ethics turn (Baumrind 1964, Burger 2009 with ~70%). Why this supports exactly the thesis of Arendt and Bonhoeffer – and why even canonical "truths" deserve scrutiny.
The real problem is not the few truly evil people at the top – those one could deal with – but the many followers who follow them uncritically and thereby make them powerful in the first place. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote this down in 1942 within the resistance, in the section "On Stupidity" from "After Ten Years" (later in "Letters and Papers from Prison"); in 1945 he was executed at Flossenbürg. His thesis: "Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice" – for "against stupidity we are defenceless". The decisive point: by "stupidity" he means no lack of intelligence but a moral-social defect produced by power – "the power of the one needs the stupidity of the others". The follower becomes a "will-less instrument", "capable of any evil" and "at the same time unable" to recognise it as evil. With the independent parallel to Hannah Arendt's thoughtlessness, Bonhoeffer's resolution (not an act of instruction but of inner liberation to a "responsible life before God") as a bridge to the site's conscience theme – and a warning about the many Bonhoeffer misquotes. All quotes verbatim from the original, in the public domain since 2016.
The "life flashing before your eyes in seconds" sounds like a movie cliché but is one of the best-documented elements of the near-death experience – with a research lineage more than 130 years old. From 1892 Albert Heim surveyed fallen mountaineers (his own Säntis fall in 1871) and assembled the first systematic collection of near-death experiences. Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti translated Heim and measured the phenomenon empirically ("panoramic memory", 205 accounts, 60 with a life review). In Bruce Greyson's NDE Scale the review belongs to the cognitive cluster. Kenneth Ring worked out the uncomfortable core: the perspective reversal in which one feels one's own deed from the other's side ("I was the very people that I hurt"). With an honest reductive counter-side – depersonalization, temporal lobe, the 2022 incidentally recorded "dying brain" gamma finding (single case) – and the question these models leave open: they explain the trigger, not where the other's perspective and the never-consciously-encoded contents come from. The life review as a hint toward non-local storage (van Lommel) – and the bridge to Hannah Arendt's conscience as a dialogue with oneself.
How does evil arise on a large scale? Not through monsters, but through many ordinary people who hand over their judgement and responsibility to authority, orders and the spirit of the age, without thinking for themselves. Hannah Arendt's real thesis is not "bureaucracy makes you evil" – the popular caricature of Eichmann the "banal bureaucrat" has anyway been outdated since Bettina Stangneth's "Eichmann Before Jerusalem" (2011) – but: where thinking stops, the moral brake falls away. With the "ordinary men" (Christopher Browning's Reserve Police Battalion 101, which explicitly left refusal open; Harald Welzer's three perpetrator mechanisms), an honest reading of Milgram (Gina Perry's data critique, Haslam/Reicher's "engaged followership" instead of blind obedience) and Arendt's core from "The Life of the Mind": thoughtlessness as the quiet suspension of the "two-in-one", the dialogue with oneself. The few who did not join in refused not out of loyalty to principle, but because they were unwilling to "live with a murderer" – themselves. The bridge to this site: conscience as an inner authority – up to the life review of near-death research, in which one feels one's own deed from the perspective of those affected.
The missing pillar of our series on consciousness and survival: memories at the beginning of a life rather than at its end. In 1957 Stevenson gave up his psychiatry chair in Virginia to document – funded by Xerox inventor Chester Carlson, whose bequest founded the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) in 1967 – around 2,500 cases of small children who appear to carry memories of a previous life. With his conservative field method (both families interviewed separately, written records predating verification), the focus of his late work "Reincarnation and Biology" (1997) on birthmarks said to match autopsy findings, the modern James Leininger case (Jim Tucker) – and consistently symmetric scepticism: Champe Ransom (Stevenson's own assistant), the interpreter and time-gap problems, Paul Edwards, Leonard Angel and Michael Sudduth's sharp re-analysis of the Leininger case. Why the birthmark cases are the harder evidence and what the material means for the question of where memory is stored.
What counts as serious science and what as superstition is not a fixed fact but a movable line – the history of hypnosis shows it exemplarily. A Paris commission under Benjamin Franklin and Antoine Lavoisier dismissed Franz Anton Mesmer's "animal magnetism" in 1784 as mere imagination (in one of the first blinded trials in history – methodologically a triumph, and they were right about the "fluid"). Yet in the same year Puységur discovered the trance (artificial somnambulism), and with it a real phenomenon thrown out together with the fluid: the power of suggestion. James Braid coined the term "hypnosis" in 1843 and discarded the fluid; in 1882 Charcot legitimised hypnosis again before the same Académie des sciences; the Nancy school (Bernheim, Liébeault) established suggestion. Yet hypnosis itself stayed marginal for almost the entire 20th century – in psychology it was at times dismissed as mere role-play (Sarbin, Barber, Spanos); only brain scans (Rainville 1997, PET: hypnotic suggestion measurably alters pain-processing regions) demonstrated objective neural effects. Honestly framed: trance and suggestion became science, the somnambules' clairvoyance did not. The lesson is not "the sceptics are always wrong" but that the line between science and superstition is drawn by institutions and shifts over time.
The high point of serious mental mediumship research – the exact counterpart to the fraud-prone theatre of physical mediumship. After the deaths of the SPR founders Frederic Myers (1901), Edmund Gurney (1888) and Henry Sidgwick (1900) – all classical scholars – fragmentary classical allusions appeared over three decades in the automatic scripts of several mediums on different continents, meaningless on their own and forming a common theme only when combined. Allegedly an experiment designed by the deceased themselves to rule out telepathy among the living. With the automatists (Mrs Verrall, Mrs Holland alias Kipling's sister Alice Fleming, Mrs Willett alias Winifred Coombe-Tennant, Leonora Piper), the analysts (Alice Johnson, Piddington, Eleanor Sidgwick), the famous cases (Hope, Star and Browning; the Ear of Dionysius) and the honest criticism (chance, loose interpretation, observer closeness, "super-psi").
The most famous physical medium in history. The Scottish spiritualist (pronounced "Hume") appeared in the salons of the European aristocracy, mostly in good light and without a fixed fee: levitations of objects and of himself (the famous Ashley House episode of 1868 before Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay and Captain Wynne), an accordion playing without contact, elongation, the handling of glowing coals. William Crookes took him into the laboratory in 1871 (the accordion in a cage, the spring-balance test) and posited a "psychic force". With the sceptics (Browning's "Mr Sludge", Podmore), the Lyon lawsuit and an honest assessment – the hardest case in the whole field.
The German key figure of physical mediumship – the counterpart to Crookes (England) and Richet (France). The Munich physician, psychiatrist and baron came from hypnosis and suggestion research (an early forensic psychologist) and brought the camera into the field: his main work "Phenomena of Materialisation" (1914) documented ectoplasm photographically. He read it not spiritistically but as "ideoplasty" (shaped by the unconscious). With the famous study subject Eva C. (Marthe Béraud) – and the still-contested criticism of it (the "Le Miroir" cut-outs, smuggled pins, de Heredia's replication), which Schrenck-Notzing met with controls and his ideoplasty reading; an unambiguous proof is lacking either way. Harder to explain are the brothers Willi (from 1919) and Rudi Schneider (from 1925) under strict controls (tied up, marked with luminous pins, held, and finally a planned electrical control system) – as well as the later controversies around Rudi (Osty's infrared, Harry Price's photograph).
From 1993 to 1998 the "Scole Group" around Robin and Sandra Foy and the trance mediums Alan and Diana Bennett produced a whole repertoire of physical phenomena in the cellar of a Norfolk farmhouse: floating lights, images on sealed films, apports, direct voices, a dissolving crystal. Three reputable Society for Psychical Research researchers – Montague Keen, Arthur Ellison and David Fontana – monitored a long series of sittings from 1995 to 1997; visitors included Rupert Sheldrake, Robert Morris and Alan Gauld. The 452-page Scole Report (1999) found no direct indication of fraud but was not enough to prove the survival of consciousness after death. With honest criticism: total darkness, no control of the mediums, the group's own equipment, rejected tightening, Cornell's LED reproduction and the design flaw of the film containers.
The explainer overview of the rarest and most contested form of mediumship. Unlike mental mediumship (inner messages), physical mediumship claims an objectively perceptible effect in the room: raps, table movement and levitation, direct voices, apports, light phenomena and – as the most spectacular phenomenon – materialisation and ectoplasm (a term coined by Charles Richet). With a historical arc (Fox sisters 1848, D. D. Home/Crookes, Palladino/Richet, Schrenck-Notzing and the Schneider brothers, Helen Duncan, the Scole experiment 1993–1998, today Kruse and Kai Mügge), how a séance works (energy, trance, cabinet, red light; English binding vs. German hold-control; Kruse's microphone triangulation of the voices) and an honest reckoning with the fraud problem and the "quantum physics proves everything" trap.
The longest-serving and most highly decorated remote viewer of the US programme: Joseph McMoneagle (b. 1946), US Army chief warrant officer, "Remote Viewer 001" in the Stargate programme and recipient of the Legion of Merit for his intelligence contributions. His most famous 1979 session described, in a hall at the Severodvinsk naval base, a novel double-hulled submarine that would be floated out through a canal still to be dug – months later satellite images confirmed the Typhoon class, the largest submarine ever built. With his 1970 near-death experience, the Dozier case, Skylab and an honest assessment (non-blind conditions, embellishment, operational value != proof of psi). Completes the trio with Ingo Swann and Pat Price.
While Ingo Swann shaped the method of remote viewing, former Burbank police commissioner Pat Price (1918–1975) delivered the most spectacular operational hits at the Stanford Research Institute. From coordinates alone he described the NSA station Sugar Grove (1973) – the test that convinced the CIA – and the secret Soviet site URDF-3 near Semipalatinsk (1974, the CIA's first operational task): a huge gantry crane and welded steel spheres, documented in the declassified CIA analysis. With his mysterious 1975 death and an honest assessment (noise alongside signal, the Marks/Kammann cue critique, operational use ≠ proof).
Veridical perception, remote viewing, consciousness beyond the brain – why do such fields stay at the margins even when the evidence is more interesting than the mainstream admits? This article argues an uncomfortable but defensible thesis: you need no central conspiracy. Four mechanisms suffice – paradigm protection (Kuhn), pseudo-skepticism (Truzzi), career and funding incentives, cultural hegemony – topped by the cool power logic of information asymmetry (cui bono). With the documented Helen Duncan case (HMS Barham, Witchcraft Act 1944, Churchill's "obsolete tomfoolery") and the decisive point that global uniformity is precisely NOT evidence of a central command but follows from a shared system.
A single spectacular near-death case can always be explained away – a systematic tally across more than a hundred cases cannot. In 2009, in the field's standard handbook, Janice Miner Holden (University of North Texas, editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, IANDS president) was the first to review every documented case of veridical out-of-body perception: 107 cases, and by the most stringent criterion conceivable (one wrong detail fails the whole case) only 8 % were inaccurate – 92 % completely correct. Why this aggregate evidence weighs more methodologically than the famous dentures case or Pam Reynolds.
Scepticism is a virtue of science – examining before judging. But there is a variety that judges first and ridicules instead of examining. Marcello Truzzi, co-founder of the influential sceptics' organisation CSICOP, coined the term "pseudo-sceptic" for it and left in protest: the group practised advocacy rather than open-ended examination and misused the line "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" as immunisation. At the centre is the asymmetry of the burden of proof: the claim of a phenomenon is examined strictly, but the debunking is usually believed unexamined – even though an "exposure video" can be wrong, selective or staged. The case study is Uri Geller: SRI experiments by Targ and Puthoff published in Nature (1974), a trigger of the state remote-viewing programmes (Stargate), versus the famous 1973 Carson show that was planned as a takedown but made him more famous instead. A fair assessment: not "proven genuine" but contested – pushed out, not refuted. The demand: the same standards for both sides.
A robotics computer scientist in a darkened séance room – that is the hallmark of Prof. Dr. Eckhard Kruse. He studied computer science with applied physics, earned his doctorate in robotics and image processing and has been Professor of Applied Computer Science at DHBW since 2008. His subject is physical mediumship: immediately observable phenomena such as moving objects, raps, flashes of light, "spirit hands", materialisations and ectoplasm – in the tradition of Crookes and Richet, but also the field with the largest history of fraud. His real contribution is method: infrared/night-vision cameras and motion sensors attached to the medium bring engineering-grade, continuous control into the dark room to rule out conventional explanations. Collaborations include Kai Mügge (monitored sessions in Hanau) and Gary Mannion, as adviser to the Basel Psi Association, together with the psychologist Dr. Heike Bauder; book "Der Geist in der Materie". A fair assessment: not accepted by science, the dark room remains a weak point – what is valuable is the stance of separating phenomenon from interpretation.
"Every child wants to learn. Humans are curious by nature." That sentence sums up what the Austrian memory trainer Ricardo Leppe stands for. From the magician's craft (for which a good memory is mandatory) he transferred well-known memory techniques to school material: the loci method (memory palace), mnemonics (translating the abstract into vivid images) and Vedic mathematics (calculation shortcuts against the fear of arithmetic) – always playful and visual rather than a frontal lecture. In 2020 he founded the association "Wissen schafft Freiheit" in Gloggnitz, with by now over 100 free learning videos for self-determined learning "without cost, without pressure, without a fixed sequence". The common denominator is exactly what learning psychology describes as effective: linking, imaging, tying to emotion. Following on from Vera F. Birkenbihl and the Prussian school model – with a fair assessment: powerful tools for retention that complement, not replace, deep understanding.
"Children come into the world as learning machines – and unlearn the joy of learning of all places at school." That is how Vera F. Birkenbihl (1946–2011) summed up her critique. Her guiding concept was "brain-friendly" learning, her core thesis: school works systematically against the brain. Nine criticisms – brain-hostile frontal teaching, "bulimic learning" instead of understanding, no links to prior knowledge, no sense of meaning, fear and grade pressure as a block, grades as a poor measure, lockstep instead of individuality, rote cramming (countered by her language method, ABC lists, KaWa/KaGa) and artificial subject separation. The decisive twist: many of these symptoms have a structural cause in the Prussian school model – age-graded classes, the 45-minute period and the bell, frontal teaching, a standardised curriculum, grades as selection, discipline before curiosity; a system optimised for standardisation and compliance, not for understanding. With links to herd behaviour and the "majority versus experts" question – and a fair assessment (learning types are considered outdated).
Can an entire population be steered on purpose? The question is the subject of an almost century-old field of research – and the findings cut both ways. The classics: Walter Lippmann's "pictures in our heads" (Public Opinion, 1922), Edward Bernays' "Propaganda" (1928, the "torches of freedom" campaign), Harold Lasswell's content analysis, the "seven propaganda devices" of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1937, e.g. name-calling and bandwagon). The empirical turn: Hovland's Yale studies (source credibility, sleeper effect), Cantril's War-of-the-Worlds study, Adorno's "Authoritarian Personality". The critical line: Ellul (propaganda as a climate) and Chomsky/Herman ("Manufacturing Consent"). Today: computational propaganda (bots, microtargeting, Cambridge Analytica), soft power, nudging and "cognitive warfare" (Jonas Tögel), and inoculation theory ("prebunking"). The honest assessment: the mechanisms are established but the strength of the effect is overstated – instead of a "hypodermic needle" the limited-effects model holds. Why this matters symmetrically, in both directions.
"Humans are herd animals" – is it true, and how good is the evidence? That people orient strongly toward the group is one of the best-established findings in social psychology: Solomon Asch's line experiment (1951), in which about 37% of judgements followed the obviously wrong group consensus and roughly three in four people conformed at least once; Muzafer Sherif's autokinetic effect (1935), where a lasting group norm forms in ambiguous situations; Cialdini's social proof, Milgram's street experiment, herding in financial markets (Shiller, information cascades) and the neural finding that deviating produces an "error signal" (Klucharev 2009). But "instinct" is the wrong word: behind it stand two explainable mechanisms – informational and normative influence – and the effect is highly context-dependent. Where the facts are clear, conformity drops, and a single ally breaks the pressure. Why this matters for the dismissal of uncomfortable findings (near-death, mediumship) – in both directions.
"Whoever believes they speak with the dead is ill" – the psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida (UFJF, NUPES research centre) did not merely assert this convenient equation but measured it. In the study "Dissociative and Psychotic Experiences in Brazilian Spiritist Mediums" (with Lotufo Neto and the near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, 2006) the team surveyed 115 Spiritist mediums: high educational level, low prevalence of mental disorders, socially well adjusted – and crucially, the number of their dissociative/psychotic-like experiences did not correlate with markers of disorder. A companion study (J Nerv Ment Dis 2008) shows that, despite surface similarities, mediumship must not be confused with dissociative identity disorder (DID) – mediums are better adjusted, use no antipsychotics, and have fewer histories of abuse. The diagnostic core (DSM/ICD): an unusual experience alone, without distress, is not an illness – a finding that reaches into the ICD-11 debate.
Behind the Brazilian studies on mediums and psychography the same name usually appears: Alexander Moreira-Almeida (b. 1974), professor of psychiatry at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), trained at USP and a postdoctoral fellow in religion and health at Duke University. He founded NUPES (Núcleo de Pesquisas em Espiritualidade e Saúde) at UFJF, one of the world’s most visible centres for "spirituality and health" (190+ papers, 8,500+ citations). Four research lines: are mediums mentally ill? (study of 115 mediums; mediumship vs. dissociative identity disorder, 2008); spirituality and mental health (lower rates of depression, suicidality, substance use); mediumship in the brain (co-author of the 2012 SPECT study); and the mind-brain problem (book "Exploring Frontiers of the Mind-Brain Relationship"). As WPA section chair (2014–2020) he coordinated the WPA Position Statement on Spirituality and Religion in Psychiatry. An honest assessment: methodologically careful, no proof of survival of consciousness; controlled mediumship tests (2020) were negative — his real achievement is the creation of an academic framework.
No work has shaped Brazilian Spiritism’s vision of the afterlife as much as "Nosso Lar" ("Our Home"). Psychographed by Chico Xavier in 1944 and attributed to the spirit of a deceased physician named André Luiz, it describes a life after death that is neither heaven nor hell: André Luiz dies, awakens in the bleak umbral and is admitted to the spirit colony Nosso Lar — a city "hovering" above Rio with hospitals, schools, work teams and hierarchy, conceived as a transit station before the next reincarnation. A striking motif: the deceased are influenced by the thoughts and grief of their living relatives. In 2010 the story was filmed as "Astral City" (director Wagner de Assis, music by Philip Glass, Renato Prieto as André Luiz) and became one of Brazil’s biggest box-office hits with around 4 million viewers. Content, cosmology, the André Luiz series and an honest assessment between cultural significance and an open question of truth.
One of the most unusual careers in Brazilian Spiritism: the physician Waldo Vieira (1932–2015) psychographed 18 books alongside Chico Xavier from 1955 to 1966 (including "Evolução em Dois Mundos", attributed to the spirit André Luiz) — then broke with Spiritism in 1966 to found the out-of-body experience as a religion-free "science": projectiology and conscientiology. He created his own system of terms (holosoma, thosene, cosmoethics, penta, the "principle of disbelief"), wrote around 41 books and built an institutional apparatus (IIPC 1988 in Rio; CEAEC in Foz do Iguaçu / "Cognópolis"). The article frames the break with Chico Xavier, presents the doctrine, and honestly explains why established science views it as pseudoscience (self-created terminology, no independent validation, lack of falsifiability) — while noting the movement’s rejection of cult accusations.
While Brazil is famous for spectacular mediums (Chico Xavier, Zé Arigó), the civil engineer Hernani Guimarães Andrade (1913–2003) embodied the opposite: the sober researcher who wanted to test the phenomena of Spiritism with measurement protocols and scepticism. In 1963 he founded the IBPP (Instituto Brasileiro de Pesquisas Psicobiofísicas) in São Paulo — Latin America’s first psychical research body, a Brazilian counterpart to the British SPR. Using the methods of Ian Stevenson (reincarnation) and Hans Bender and William Roll (poltergeist/RSPK) he documented around 75 reincarnation and 32 poltergeist cases — including the famous Jaboticabal case (Maria José Ferreira, 1965/66). The British author Guy Lyon Playfair carried the cases into English in "The Flying Cow" (1975). Andrade’s "Biological Organizing Model" (from 1984) anticipated Sheldrake’s morphic fields. An honest assessment: fascinating field research on spontaneous cases, not controlled laboratory proof.
How do you test a healing practice that works with "healing fluids" using clinical-medicine tools? The group around Ricardo de Souza Cavalcante (UNESP, 2016) subjected the Spiritist passe (laying on of hands) to a randomised, sham-controlled design (real vs. sham passe, 50 participants, 8 weekly sessions, anxiety measured via STAI). Result: anxiety fell in both groups (p<0.0001) but more in the real-passe group (p=0.02); at the end only 17% vs. 63% still met the anxiety criterion. The article explains what an RCT is and why the sham control subtracts the placebo effect, presents the methodologically even stronger double-blind preterm-newborn RCT (2018, cortisol/respiratory rate) and further passe studies (cardiac patients, preoperative anxiety) — and locates it between non-specific factors and specific effect. A serious signal, not a proof of efficacy.
Brazil runs a network of around 50 psychiatric hospitals that, for over half a century, have combined conventional psychiatry (ICD/DSM diagnostics, psychotropic medication) with optional spiritist therapies — disobsession (spirit release), the passe (laying on of hands, "fluidotherapy"), intercessory prayer and fraternal dialogue. The authoritative review by Lucchetti, Moreira-Almeida and colleagues (Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 2012) studied six leading hospitals: the model is explicitly integrative and non-indoctrinating (no one has to become a Spiritist), and the voluntary nature increases acceptance — while the authors openly name the evidence gap (no standardised protocols, few controlled studies). The historical root is Bezerra de Menezes’s 1897 concept of obsession; the oldest house is the Sanatório Espírita de Uberaba (from 1933). Plus the sham-controlled RCT on passe therapy for anxiety (Cavalcante 2016) and an honest assessment between non-specific factors and specific effect.
Chico Xavier psychographed over 450 books under dozens of "spirit authors" — and the Brazilian forensic document examiner Carlos Augusto Perandréa demonstrated in his 1991 graphoscopy study that the signatures of deceased authors in the psychographies matched the handwriting they had documented in life, not Chico's own. Stylometric consistency across seven decades (Emmanuel, André Luiz, Humberto de Campos), the question of medical knowledge in the André Luiz series despite a primary-school education, and the forensic application of these methods in two famous Brazilian court cases (Humberto de Campos 1944; Goiânia acquittal 1979). An independent line of evidence on whether the texts can be explained by Chico's ordinary abilities — three explanations (literary talent, dissociation, external source) remain open.
In 2012, Julio Peres, Alexander Moreira-Almeida and US neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studied ten Brazilian psychography mediums using SPECT imaging (PLoS ONE 2012). The striking finding: experienced mediums showed reduced frontal lobe activity — the region for planned, intentional writing — during trance, even though the texts they produced were linguistically more complex than their normal writing. In less experienced mediums the pattern was reversed. The result fits dissociation studies on jazz improvisation and deep meditation, and remains the most methodologically rigorous neuroimaging investigation of psychography to date.
When people asked Divaldo Franco for proof of his teaching, he pointed not to his books but to a piece of land in Salvador da Bahia. The Mansão do Caminho ("Mansion of the Way"), founded on 15 August 1952 by Divaldo Franco and Nilson de Souza Pereira as the social work of the Centro Espírita Caminho da Redenção (first in Calçada, then Pau da Lima), is the most concrete charitable work of Brazilian Spiritism. Instead of a mass orphanage, small family houses with foster mothers (casas-lares); today a complex of around 78,000 m² serving more than 5,000 people daily, free of charge – with schools (crèche "A Manjedoura" to the Colégio Nilson de Souza Pereira), a health centre and a maternity ward. Funded by the donated royalties of Divaldo's 250+ books. With the spiritist motto "Fora da caridade não há salvação" – and the core idea: a verifiable legacy, whatever one makes of mediumship.
Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes (1831–1900) is a special case: not a spectacular medium but a respected physician and politician. As the "doctor of the poor" he treated the poor for free; for the Liberal Party he sat on the Rio city council and in the imperial parliament and was regarded as incorruptible. His public conversion in 1886 lent Spiritism – fought by Church and criminal law – social credibility. As president of the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (1895–1900) he united a movement torn between "scientists" and the religious. In "Madness under a New Prism" he interpreted part of mental illness as obsession (the basis of disobsession) – with an honest assessment of the tension with modern psychiatry. And the remarkable part: after his death the organizer himself became one of the most-invoked spirit guides – psychographed by Chico Xavier and Divaldo Franco, with healing evenings named after him to this day.
Behind Chico Xavier, Divaldo Franco and all of Brazilian mediumship stands not a medium but an institution: the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (FEB), founded in Rio on 1 January 1884 (the ground prepared by the journal Reformador from 1883). It turned Allan Kardec's French doctrine into an organized mass movement. Bezerra de Menezes (1831–1900) united the divided early movement and – against Kardec's own reserve – brought the religious-charitable side to the fore. The 1949 Golden Pact created a unified national structure; the FEB publishing house (which also issues Chico Xavier's books, whose rights he donated) funds the social work, since all spiritual services must be free. Plus the systematic study programme (ESDE), regulated mediumistic practice (passe, disobsession), the 1984 move to Brasília, and the international spiritist council CEI (1992).
Behind Chico Xavier and the whole of Brazilian Spiritism stands a Frenchman who was never a medium himself: Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1804–1869), a sober Parisian educator and pupil of Pestalozzi. At first he mocked table-turning – "I will believe it when shown a table has a brain" – then examined it with a comparative method: the same questions through many circles unknown to one another, keeping only the answers that agreed. Under the pen name Allan Kardec (supposedly a Druidic past life) he codified the doctrine in five books (The Spirits Book 1857 to The Genesis 1868), founded the Revue Spirite in 1858 and made reincarnation its core axiom. Plus the Barcelona book-burning (1861), his falsifiability motto, the dolmen grave at Père Lachaise – and why the doctrine became a mass movement not in France but in Brazil. With an honest assessment of the limits of his "method".
Zé Arigó (José Pedro de Freitas, 1921–1971) is the most controversial case of Brazilian Spiritism: a barely educated miner from Congonhas who, in trance, operated on people – with a pocket or kitchen knife, without anaesthesia or disinfection – and wrote complicated prescriptions, both attributed to the spirit of a German physician, Dr. Adolf Fritz. In 1963 the US parapsychologist Andrija Puharich filmed him and had excised tissue analysed (genuine diseased tissue, not the animal blood of Filipino trick healers), yet it was not a controlled trial. Plus the two convictions for quackery (a pardon by President Kubitschek), the fatal 1971 car crash – and a deliberately balanced assessment: the believers' over-claims ("2 million patients, never an infection") are unverifiable, while the real puzzle is the prescriptions. A historical account, not medical advice.
Divaldo Pereira Franco (1927–2025) was, after Chico Xavier, the most important figure of Brazilian Spiritism – not the reclusive writer but the world-travelling orator and man of action. In 1952, with Nilson de Souza Pereira, he founded the Mansão do Caminho in Salvador: not an anonymous mass orphanage but small family houses with foster mothers, today a city of care with schools, a clinic and a maternity ward serving around 6,000 people daily. Funded by the notarially donated royalties of more than 250 psychographed books (over 8 million copies sold). The spirit author of most works is Joanna de Ângelis, whose psychological series links Kardec strikingly closely to the depth psychology of C. G. Jung. Plus the xenoglossy reports and the question of where the information comes from – and the core idea: a mediumship whose fruits are verifiable, whatever one makes of its source.
Francisco Cândido Xavier (1910–2002) is the face of Brazilian Spiritism: a desperately poor man with barely four years of schooling who produced more than 450 books by psychography (automatic writing) over seven decades – in the styles of dead poets – and kept not a cent for himself. His very first poetry collection, Parnaso de Além-Túmulo (1932), matched the individual metres of deceased poets so precisely that critics could barely argue against it. Plus the Humberto de Campos copyright trial (1944), in which a court declared itself incompetent because it could not establish a spirit's authorship; and the Maurício Garcez Henrique case (Goiânia): a psychographed letter exonerating the accused friend José Divino Nunes was admitted as evidence by judge Orimar de Bastos in 1979 – acquittal. With the sceptics' objections (hot reading, cryptomnesia) and the question of where the verifiable information comes from.
Brazil is the world capital of Spiritism: this is where Kardecist mediumship became a mass movement. Chico Xavier (1910–2002) produced over 400 books by psychography and donated all proceeds; Divaldo Franco built a large social institution out of mediumship; the "spirit surgeon" Zé Arigó allegedly operated in trance. Carried by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (1884) and a network of spiritist hospitals where mediumistic experiences are not reflexively pathologized. The scientific anchor comes from psychiatrist Alexander Moreira-Almeida (UFJF/NUPES) – 115 mentally healthy mediums – and the SPECT study by Peres, Newberg & Moreira-Almeida (PLoS ONE 2012): reduced frontal-lobe activity during more complex automatic writing.
Interchangeable in everyday speech, yet historically two distinct – and in the 19th century even rival – movements. Anglo-American Spiritualism (Fox sisters, Hydesville 1848) is an empirical-religious movement of spirit communication through mediums and classically rejected reincarnation. Allan Kardec's Spiritism (Le Livre des Esprits, 1857) makes reincarnation its core axiom and sees itself as an experiential science. Kardec coined the word "spiritisme" himself to set it apart from "spiritualisme" – which in philosophy already means the counter-position to materialism (Bergson). Plus the fraternal war over rebirth, Brazilian Kardecism today (Chico Xavier) and why the distinction helps when reading the other articles.
Melchior Joller (1818–1865), a liberal lawyer and Swiss national councillor, was an avowed rationalist – and in 1862 recorded, in his own family home in Stans, one of the best-documented poltergeist cases in history. Triple knocking and a white figure (son Oskar, 5 June), answering knocks from the walls, rooms devastated within seconds, an apple that flew straight back in after being thrown out of the window, stones between playing children. A government commission searched only for fraud by the family and found nothing; the empty house stayed silent, and the furniture danced again when the family returned. His 1863 book cost him his reputation, his friends and his home – he died impoverished in Rome. The case in the light of modern RSPK research (Bender, Huesmann & Schriever, Lucadou): bound to persons, not to the place, and a hostile rationalist witness.
Gisela Huesmann and Friederike Schriever at the IGPP under Hans Bender analysed 253 poltergeist cases from 1947–1986 quantitatively. The statistical fingerprint: 91% acoustic phenomena, 70% object movements, 29% electrical disturbances, apparitions under 10%. Focal persons in puberty (girls averaging 11, boys 13 years). Anomalous trajectories, the occlusion effect, the bell-curve time structure and the psychosomatic family profile. Poltergeist as unconscious psychokinetic discharge, not haunting.
Louisa E. Rhine (1891–1983) classified over 14,000 spontaneous psi reports at the Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory into four categories: realistic dreams, symbolic dreams, intuitions and hallucinations. The taxonomy that remains the standard for field research to this day. Ten cases from her collection — the chandelier above the cradle, the mother at the garden pond, the brother's face in the mirror, the withered roses and others — told and analysed in the style of the popular Lucadou case page. With the pattern behind the cases: emotional bond as trigger, crisis situation as context, protective impulse as dominant function.
Federico Faggin (b. 1941 in Vicenza) designed the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, in 1971, invented MOS silicon-gate technology, founded Zilog (Z80) and Synaptics (touchpad). National Medal of Technology 2010, Kyoto Prize 1997. After decades at the forefront of the semiconductor industry, he turned to consciousness research and in 2011 founded the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation. His book Irriducibile (Mondadori 2022, English Irreducible 2024) argues: consciousness is fundamental, not derivable from matter – and no machine will ever possess it. Qualia are not computable. With the connection to Tononi's Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the pattern series from Planck through Schrödinger, Eccles and Penrose. The man who built the hardware says: consciousness is not software.
Two entangled particles respond to each other simultaneously, no matter how far apart — not at the speed of light, but instantaneously. Einstein called this spooky action at a distance in 1935 and considered it proof that quantum mechanics was incomplete (EPR paper with Podolsky and Rosen). John Bell proved mathematically in 1964 that Einstein was wrong: no hidden variables. Alain Aspect confirmed this experimentally in Paris in 1982. In 2015 three independent teams (Delft, Vienna, Boulder) closed all remaining loopholes. In 2022 the Nobel Prize went to Aspect, Clauser and Zeilinger. The non-locality of quantum mechanics is an experimentally established fact. What it ontologically means, nobody knows.
William McDougall's rat experiment at Harvard University (1920–1938, 49 generations): rats learned ten times faster across generations. F.A.E. Crew's Edinburgh replication was inconclusive. The decisive Melbourne study by W.E. Agar et al. (20 years, 50 generations, Journal of Experimental Biology) confirmed the finding — and delivered the surprise: the never-trained control group improved equally. This refutes Lamarck, fits no known biological model, and has been unexplained since 1954. Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis (A New Science of Life, 1981, Nature review: "a book for burning") offers an interpretation. With connections to PEAR and the Global Consciousness Project.
Louisa E. Rhine classified over 14,000 spontaneous psi reports and created the first systematic taxonomy of anomalous experiences: realistic dreams, unrealistic dreams, intuitions, hallucinations. Her husband J. B. Rhine's Duke laboratory became the FRNM in 1962 and the Rhine Research Center in 1995 – one of the oldest continuously operating psi research institutions in the world, now in its 95th year.
Roger D. Nelson, senior researcher at the PEAR lab, founded the Global Consciousness Project in 1998: a worldwide network of up to 70 quantum random number generators that registers systematic deviations from chance during major events such as September 11, 2001. 500+ formal events, cumulative statistics at p ≈ 10⁻¹², the FieldREG backstory, methodological criticism (event selection, time-window flexibility), and the transition to GCP-2.0 with pre-registration.
A source-critical reconstruction of the Hydesville rappings and the career of the Fox sisters Margaretta ("Maggie", 14), Catherine ("Kate", 11) and Leah (35). With Mrs. Fox's affidavit of 11 April 1848, the "Mr. Splitfoot" question-and-answer game, the three Corinthian Hall investigations in Rochester 1849, the sceptical Buffalo report of 1851 (Flint/Lee/Coventry), William Crookes's 1874 examination of Kate Fox in London, Maggie's confession at the New York Academy of Music on 21 October 1888 (with the internal inconsistencies — false age claims — suppressed in popular reception), the 1889 retraction and the 1904 cellar bone discovery at Hydesville. Today's standard literature: Barbara Weisberg 2004, Ann Braude 1989, McLuhan/Wehrstein in the SPR's Psi Encyclopedia. With the historical impact from Hydesville via Allan Kardec, the 1882 founding of the SPR and William James through to today's academic mediumship research (Beischel/Windbridge, Schwartz/Veritas, Tressoldi meta-analysis, Lazar/EREAMS).
Voltaire's mockingly distanced way of dealing with the mystical became the global academic standard not through a law, but through a habitus. The diffusion runs through Sanssouci 1750–1753 (Voltaire's three years as Frederick's house guest), Frederick II, the Prussian General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 1763 (drafted by the pietist theologian Johann Julius Hecker, not Voltairean in wording but in elite ethos), Wilhelm von Humboldt's university reform of 1810, Horace Mann's Seventh Annual Report of 1843 (Prussian schools as "first of all nations") and the Japanese Gakusei of 1872. Kant absorbed the same zeitgeist but treated Swedenborg methodically rather than reflexively (Knobloch letter 1763, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer 1766) – a path that was lost in academic practice. With the decisive turn 1906–1910 (Curie, Kelvin, James, Münsterberg's Palladino exposure) when the Voltairean tone shifted from elite habitus to institutional filter.
A little-noted family configuration of European intellectual history around 1760: Frederick II of Prussia (architect of the modern school system with the General-Land-Schul-Reglement of 12 August 1763), his elder sister Louisa Ulrika (Queen of Sweden, who received Swedenborg in 1758 and 1761 and turned pale at the message from the deceased brother August William), Emanuel Swedenborg himself and Immanuel Kant (working in parallel in Königsberg from 1762 on the epistemological question). With source-critical separation: Frederick followed Voltaire philosophically, not Kant; the reglement created the form of school in 1763, the substantive anti-mediumistic filtering only followed with the academic materialist turn from 1906. Steiner's Waldorf school from 1919 as a counter-model to both.
Portrait of one of the most influential figures in European intellectual history of the early 20th century. Three biographical phases: Goethe scholar in Weimar (1890–1897), theosophist in Berlin (1902–1912), anthroposophist in Dornach (1912–1925). Own claim of clairvoyant Akashic-Chronicle research with over 6,000 documented lectures. Sharp methodological demarcation from classical trance mediumship (atavism argument, responsibility argument, activity model) – which is, in practice, softer than in theory, because today's mediums describe their working state exactly as Steiner claimed for himself. The institutional impacts (over 1,200 Waldorf schools worldwide, Demeter biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, the Camphill movement, the Christian Community). With the critical academic source picture: Helmut Zander 2007 (standard work), Christoph Lindenberg 1997, Geoffrey Ahern 2009 and Peter Staudenmaier 2014 on the problematic passages.
A social-psychological explanation for the unusually forceful defence against NDE and mediumship research. Layer 1: motivated cognition (Festinger 1957, Kunda 1990, Kahan in the 2010s) – humans infer not from evidence but from self- and identity-protection. Layer 2: Terror Management Theory (Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski since 1986, over 400 studies, main work "The Worm at the Core" 2015) – being reminded of one's own mortality strengthens the defence of one's worldview. Plus Thomas Nagel's open admission in "The Last Word" 1997 ("I don't want there to be a God"), Bruce Greyson's observation on the "more emotional than scientific" NDE defence, and the specific moral dimension of the life-review finding with its perspective reversal. Argues cautiously: not ad hominem against individual sceptics, but structurally about the unusual forcefulness – with the methodological self-requirement on all participants to reflect on their own relationship to mortality.
One of the most unusual books in the history of philosophy: Kant's anonymously published "Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics" (Königsberg 1766) deals exclusively with Emanuel Swedenborg and the question of what human reason can do with reports of contact with the spiritual world. Three years earlier, Kant had publicly stated in his letter to Charlotte von Knobloch (10 August 1763) that he personally had the Stockholm fire incident investigated by an English merchant sent to Sweden – with full confirmation of every detail. Today's Kant scholarship (Stengel 2011, Kuehn 2001, Johnson 2002) no longer reads the "Dreams" as a wholesale dismissal of Swedenborg but as a methodological turning point: out of the Swedenborg case arises in Kant the question of the limits of theoretical reason, which is systematically answered fifteen years later in the "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781). The only case in the history of philosophy in which a leading philosopher investigated a mediumistic file with his own field inquiry and his own book.
Portrait of the Swedish mining counsellor, anatomist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. The first half of his life as Royal Swedish mining counsellor with recognised scientific publishing activity (Opera Philosophica et Mineralia 1734, Regnum Animale 1744/45). The visionary turning point at Easter 1744 in London. The systematic theological work in over 30 Latin folios (Arcana Coelestia 1749–1756, De Caelo et Inferno 1758). The three externally documented incidents: the Stockholm fire of 19 July 1759 (Gothenburg, 400 km away, all detail statements exactly confirmed), Queen Louisa Ulrika 1761 and the message from the deceased brother, Madame de Marteville 1761 and the lost receipt. The main source for the Stockholm fire reporting is Immanuel Kant's letter to Charlotte von Knobloch of 10 August 1763, with Kant's own field investigation through an English merchant. Influence on Allan Kardec, Emerson, William Blake, William James, the SPR. With Friedemann Stengel's 2011 standard work as today's reference.
Portrait of Ingo Swann (Telluride 1933 – New York 2013), the most important single figure in the remote-viewing programme. Biographical anchors (twelve years in the UN Secretariat, Manhattan Bowery, parallel art career with over a thousand works). The CCNY magnetometer experiment of June 1972 with Gertrude Schmeidler and Arthur Hebard, which brought him to SRI. The outbounder/beacon experiments. The Jupiter viewing of 27 April 1973 with the spontaneous ring description, six years before the 1979 Voyager 1 confirmation. The development of Coordinate Remote Viewing between 1974 and 1979 in six stages, with substantial CIA funding. The training of the Stargate viewers at Fort Meade 1979–1986 (Joe McMoneagle, Lyn Buchanan, Paul Smith, Ed Dames, David Morehouse). Plus the dividing line between the methodologically documented work and the speculative late work (Penetration 1998).
Reconstruction of the Delphi Associates silver-futures experiment from late 1982 to early 1983. Russell Targ left SRI and founded Delphi Associates in California with the psychologist Keith Harary and the Texas funder Paul Temple. The associative-remote-viewing (ARV) protocol step by step: selection of two target objects, viewing of a future perceptual event, judge comparison, COMEX trade, market resolution, feedback loop closed only via the matching object. Nine consecutive correct trades, about USD 120,000 profit, chance probability 1 in 512. Subsequent failure of the second phase on scaling – psi-missing under pressure, greed and the presence of sceptics. Methodological double lesson: ARV works, but not arbitrarily scalable. With follow-ups at PEAR and in the Applied Precognition Project. Main sources: Targ & Harary, The Mind Race (1984); Schnabel, Remote Viewers (1997); Targ, The Reality of ESP (2012); Third Eye Spies (2017).
Session-by-session reconstruction of the three main experimental series with Uri Geller at the Stanford Research Institute between November 1972 and August 1973. Thirteen picture-reproduction sessions in the doubly shielded Faraday room, with ten evaluable hits (chance probability below one in a million), assessed by five independent judges in forced-choice ranking. Die-in-a-steel-box series: eight of ten correct, two passes, chance probability around one in a million. Magnetometer sessions with documented signal deflections, filmed. ESP-card series with markedly weaker results, honestly documented. With Nature 1974 (251, 602–607), the follow-up correspondence in Nature 252, Proceedings of the IEEE 1976 (64(3), 329–354), Mind-Reach 1977. Full critique–reply balance with Randi, Gardner and Hyman. Plus the 2017 declassified CIA files and the original films in the Third Eye Spies documentary.
Joint portrait of the two laser physicists who at the Stanford Research Institute between 1972 and 1985 built the remote-viewing programme. With the biographical anchors – Puthoff's textbook on quantum electronics and NSA background, Targ's contribution to the first tunable pulsed laser at GTE Sylvania and his childhood visual impairment. The two key publications Nature 1974 (251, 602–607) and Proceedings of the IEEE 1976 (64(3), 329–354). Coordinate Remote Viewing as a methodological invention. Targ's Delphi Associates silver-futures episode of 1982 (nine of nine correct predictions, ~USD 120,000). Puthoff's arc from SRI via EarthTech and IAS-A to the 2017 NYT AAWSAP disclosure. Elisabeth Targ's distant-healing study in the Western Journal of Medicine 1998 and her death in 2002 of a glioblastoma – in the middle of a glioblastoma-healing study. Both still alive and publicly active in 2026.
Portrait of Uri Geller (born 1946 in Tel Aviv): the Stanford Research Institute experiments by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ between 1972 and 1973, the Nature publication of 18 October 1974 (Nature 251, 602–607), the direct trigger of the CIA Stargate programme, the 1970s TV rise on BBC, German ZDF and the Tonight Show, the Tonight Show incident on 1 August 1973 prepared by James Randi, the academic reversal of the King's College mathematical physicist John G. Taylor between Superminds 1975 and Science and the Supernatural 1980, and Randi's sceptical position. Assessment without binary "real or trick", with the three independently documented facts of the Nature publication, the Stargate trigger and the 1970s TV space.
Portrait of one of the few actively working physical mediums in the German-speaking world: since the early 2000s Kai Mügge has led the Felix Experimental Group (FEG) in Hanau. Séances with raps, light phenomena, ectoplasm, apports and direct voice – in the tradition of Daniel Dunglas Home, Eusapia Palladino, Florence Cook and Rudi Schneider. With Stephen E. Braude's investigations in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, an honest treatment of the 2014 Hanau incident, and context within the SPR tradition and the 1906 pattern.
How a worldview arises, when it counts as firm, and why it is so hard to correct afterwards: Layer 1 is the neurobiology – myelination of the prefrontal cortex between 25 and 30, cognitive dissonance, the backfire effect, Planck's dying-out sentence. Layer 2 is institutional path dependency – the 1906 pattern, Prussian compulsory schooling, the concrete material-selection effect in schools and engineering education (Newton instead of Higgs field), the ordering effect in Wikipedia. Layer 3 is the large language model – it learns the statistical average of this corpus and reproduces the classical default even when, on direct request, it can give correct Yukawa-Higgs-QCD answers. Why the pre-1906 materialist worldview is still the default in the general education of 2026, even though physics itself has been teaching something radically different since the 1960s.
Paul Dirac (1902–1984), Nobel Prize Physics 1933, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge on Newton's chair, is the canonical counter-figure of the 1906 pattern series. Solvay 1927 in Brussels: Dirac publicly formulates an atheist position ("the very idea of God is a product of human imagination"), Pauli replies with the famous bon mot "Our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is: There is no God, and Dirac is His prophet" (recorded in Heisenberg's Physics and Beyond, Piper 1969). The later mathematical-beauty line in Scientific American May 1963 is aesthetic Platonism, not a religious turn. Dirac's work fits seamlessly into the rationalist-materialist standard canon and passes through unfiltered – which sharpens the pattern thesis rather than weakening it, by showing that it operates selectively, not across the board.
Max Planck (1858–1947), Nobel Prize Physics 1918 for the 1900 quantum hypothesis, is present in the schoolbook through the constant h and Planck's radiation law. Not in the schoolbook: his Observer interview of 25 January 1931 with J.W.N. Sullivan – "I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness" –, his Baltic lecture "Religion und Naturwissenschaft" 1937 (printed by Barth in Leipzig in several editions), his long-standing role as church elder of the Berlin-Grunewald congregation, and the personal tragedies (four children, a wife, son Erwin executed 1945 for Stauffenberg-circle involvement) as the background to his religious position. Plus a source-critical note on the problematic 1944 Florence "Nature of Matter" quotation (the Max Planck Archive itself flags the provenance as unsecured). Linked to the 1906 pattern and to the Prussian curriculum filtering.
Frederick William I in 1717, Frederick II in 1763 with the General-Land-Schul-Reglement: the birth of the modern Volksschule. Official aims reading, writing, Christianity – structural functions administration, military, discipline, leading away from "superstition". Via Horace Mann in 1843 to the United States, via Meiji-Japan in 1872 to East Asia. Four ideological overlays (Wilhelm II 1889/1892, Weimar 1920/1925, Nazi era from 1933, West-German federalism and East-German centralism 1949–1990, then the PISA shift) have never touched the form (class group, lesson clock, grading scale). The 1906-pattern connection comes in two halves: among the pre-1906 canonical figures Kepler, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin as truncated biographies (court astrology, alchemy, Boyle Lectures, Sandemanian eldership, theology, faith); among the post-1906 voices Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Eccles, Penrose, William James as biographies absent altogether. Institutional path dependency, not conspiracy. With Melton, Neugebauer, Foucault, Bourdieu, Gatto, Hentig as sources.
Dr. Christof Niederwieser (b. 1976 in Tyrol) combines economics studies in Innsbruck and Berlin, a humanities doctorate on "Prognostication in Magic and Modernity", fifteen years of corporate practice (most recently Head of Brand & Business Development at a German luxury company) and, since 2014, a full-time practice as an astrologer and futures-strategy consultant. Visiting Fellow at the IKGF at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg 2018/2019. Own methods: Group Horoscope, Astro-Kondratieff cycle, AstroMANAGEMENT. Four books, a far-reaching YouTube channel, his own software CHRONLEX. With a historical bridge to Kepler as court astrologer.
Martin Zoller (b. 1971 in Paris, grew up in Basel, Swiss citizen, for years active in Bolivia) is one of the internationally best-known German-language mediums. Became known through the 1999 Bolivia case (locating a crashed aeroplane in the jungle). Seven books (including "Hellsichtig" and "Handbuch der Intuition" with Giger Verlag), four meditation CDs, an award-winning documentary on shamanism. Works in German, English, French and Spanish. Advises private individuals, companies, lawyers and politicians worldwide. With cross-reference to the Bolivia case in our own detail article.
Birgit Fischer from Styria is one of the most far-reaching German-language voices in mediumship, healing and spirituality: several-time SPIEGEL bestselling author, operator of the Powersoul platform (powersoul.at) with her own online academy, in-demand speaker at the large channelling congresses. Books at Allegria/Ullstein and Schirner among others. Topics: personal readings, energetic healing, mediumistic training, starseeds. With a brief cross-reference to her special topic Remote Viewing for the Find Me Group, which we treat in detail in a separate article.
Kim-Anne Jannes (b. 1971 in Solingen, lives in Switzerland) is one of the best-known German-language mediums – with TV appearances on Fliege, Pro7 Galileo Mystery, RTL "Ein Gespür für Mord" and "Das Medium", and on the ARD show maischberger. Author of the book "Das Jenseits und die geistige Welt" (Droemer Knaur), director of the Flügelwerkstatt seminar centre in the Zurich area. A plainly told portrait – with a separate paragraph on the recurring observation of technical disturbances in her presence, parallel to the Pauli effect from the history of physics.
A synthesis of twelve portrait blogs: until about 1906 top scientists (Kepler, Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin, William James) could be both top academics AND researchers of metaphysical and mediumistic phenomena. Within a narrow window 1906–1910 Pierre Curie (April 1906), Lord Kelvin (December 1907) and William James (August 1910) die; Hugo Münsterberg stages the 1909 Palladino exposure as a distancing ritual of American psychology from its own psychical-research root. After 1906 the same combination becomes institutionally impossible – not through new data but through three documented mechanisms of marginalisation plus a fourth, harder variant (direct institutional action). The pattern continues to operate: Cardeña 2018, the Lucadou funding cut 2019, the Penrose Nobel 2020. With Andreas Sommer's 2013 UCL dissertation as methodological anchor. An institutional path-dependency, not a conspiracy – but also not "the data have shown it".
William James (1842–1910), Harvard professor and founder of American academic psychology ("Principles of Psychology" 1890), was at the same time twice SPR president (1894/95), co-founder of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885 and for over 25 years investigator of the Boston medium Leonora Piper – his famous "white crow". Died on 26 August 1910, months after Münsterberg's 1909 Palladino exposure, in which his own former student staged the institutional separation of psychology from its psychical-research root. The bridge case of the pattern series: model figure before 1906, institutionally displaced after 1906. With "Varieties of Religious Experience" (1902), "The Energies of Men" (1907) and the testament "The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher" (October 1909).
Sir Roger Penrose (b. 1931) – Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 for the singularity theorems, Rouse Ball Professor at Oxford, one of the major mathematical physicists of the second half of the 20th century. With "The Emperor's New Mind" (1989) and "Shadows of the Mind" (1994), the only living physics Nobel laureate with an independently worked-out quantum theory of consciousness. Since 1996 Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) jointly with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff: consciousness as a non-algorithmic process in the microtubules of neuronal cells, gravitationally induced quantum collapse as the elementary moment of conscious experience. Penrose is a secular Platonist, not a theist – thus the proof that the pattern series is defined not by religion but by insistence on non-material reality.
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), Nobel Prize in Physics 1932, discoverer of the uncertainty principle and matrix mechanics (Helgoland 1925). Director of the MPI for Physics until 1970. His autobiographical main work "Physics and Beyond" (1969), the Gifford Lectures 1955/56 ("Physics and Philosophy") and the posthumously published manuscript "Ordnung der Wirklichkeit" (written 1942, published 1989) develop the concept of a "central order" as source of physical law and ethical truth. Heisenberg's Platonic reading of elementary particles (mathematical forms instead of material building blocks) and the Bacon bonmot "the first sip makes atheistic, at the bottom of the cup God awaits". The third marginalisation variant of the pattern series: not omitted but downplayed in reach.
Sir John Eccles (1903–1997) – Australian-British neurophysiologist, student of Sherrington, Nobel Prize Medicine 1963 for the ionic mechanisms of synaptic excitation and inhibition (EPSP/IPSP). Lifelong avowed substance dualist and member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. With Karl Popper "The Self and Its Brain" (Springer 1977, 600 pages), Gifford Lectures 1977/78, "How the Self Controls Its Brain" (Springer 1994). In 1992 with the theoretical physicist Friedrich Beck a quantum-mechanical mind-brain interaction model in PNAS ("psychon" theory, PNAS 89:11357–11361) – the most concrete neuroscientific variant of the post-1906 Pauli/Bohm programme. Four years before Penrose-Hameroff Orch-OR.
David Bohm (1917–1992) – Berkeley PhD under Oppenheimer, Assistant Professor at Princeton, Einstein's preferred discussion partner on quantum foundations. Lost his US position in 1951 after refusing to testify before HUAC, moved via Brazil (passport confiscated) and Israel to London. Pioneer of the hidden-variables interpretation (de Broglie-Bohm theory 1952), co-discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect (1959), founder of the implicate-order ontology ("Wholeness and the Implicate Order" 1980) and for over three decades intense dialogue partner of Jiddu Krishnamurti. John Bell built his famous 1964 theorem explicitly on Bohm. The most densely marginalised biography in the entire pattern series – political (McCarthy), professional (hidden variables until c. 2000) and philosophical (Krishnamurti separation).
Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) – Nobel Prize in Physics 1933, founder of wave mechanics (Schrödinger equation 1926), creator of "Schrödinger's cat" (1935), at the same time a lifelong student of the Upanishads and of Advaita Vedanta. He wrote the first part of "My View of the World" in autumn 1925 – a year before wave mechanics. "What is Life?" (1944) founded molecular biology AND ended with a Vedantic epilogue on the one consciousness. "Mind and Matter" (1958): the plurality of consciousnesses is a construction of the subject-object split. With Walter Moore's Cambridge biography, the tat-tvam-asi argument, and the historical point: the worldview preceded the physics, not the other way round.
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin of Largs (1824–1907) – founder of the absolute temperature scale, co-formulator of the Second Law, architect of the transatlantic telegraph cables, 53 years Glasgow Professor, Royal Society President 1890–95, buried beside Newton in Westminster Abbey. Lifelong active in the Free Church of Scotland, in 1903 at 79 he gave a widely reported UCL lecture against scientific materialism, was Vice-President of the Christian apologetic Victoria Institute. His death in December 1907 falls with Pierre Curie's death in 1906 and Münsterberg's Palladino exposure in 1909 into the window in which the openly theistic British physics establishment ends. With the Earth-age argument, Rutherford's polite correction in 1904 and the UCL quote on the "Directive Power".
Robert Boyle (1627–1691) – co-founder of the Royal Society, author of Boyle's Law (1662) and "The Sceptical Chymist" (1661), at the same time an active alchemist in Newton's correspondence network and author of "The Christian Virtuoso" (1690). In his will he founded the Boyle Lectures – a Christian apologetic series running annually since 1692, reaching its 334th year in 2026. Lawrence Principe's Princeton study (1998) reconstructed the alchemical side (pursuit of the philosophers' stone, repeal of the anti-alchemy law in 1689, correspondence with Newton); Michael Hunter's Yale biography (2009) the theological programme. Both systematically removed from the school-chemistry image.
Michael Faraday (1791–1867) – bookbinder's apprentice with no university education, discoverer of electromagnetic induction (1831), founder of the field concept, three times elder of the strictly Bible-believing Sandemanian community in London. His search for the unity of the natural forces (electricity ↔ magnetism ↔ light ↔ gravity) was theologically motivated: if the Creator is one, the creation must be unified. Geoffrey Cantor's authoritative biography (1991) shows that this theological root of modern field physics is consistently omitted from the physics textbook. With sermon manuscripts, the 1844 exclusion, and the Faraday → Maxwell line.
James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) – first Cavendish Professor, father of electrodynamics and of the kinetic theory of gases – was a confessing, practicing Presbyterian. His 1875 Encyclopaedia Britannica article "Atom" argues the cosmic identity of atomic spectra as evidence of design. His 1873 Eranus address publicly opposed mechanistic determinism with an early chaos argument. Religious poetry, a deathbed prayer, the "Demon" paper of 1867/71 – an entire theological-philosophical substrate now almost completely retouched out of today's physics textbook. With Campbell/Garnett 1882, Niven 1890 and Harman 1990–2002 as primary source base.
Newton (1642–1727) left around one million words on alchemy and several million on anti-Trinitarian theology – more than on physics. Cambridge and the Royal Society kept these writings as "not fit to be printed" for 200 years after his death. Only the 1936 Sotheby's auction (with buyers John Maynard Keynes and Abraham Yahuda) and Keynes' 1946 lecture "Newton, the Man" brought the other Newton back into view: "He was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." With today's editions at the Newton Project (Oxford) and Chymistry of Isaac Newton (Indiana).
Six cases from the lectures and books of Walter von Lucadou, head of the Parapsychological Counselling Service in Freiburg and successor of Hans Bender: the bowling alley after hours, the operating-room monitors, the grandfather clock on the night of the death, the dream of the burning cradle, the foreseen car accident with the red sports car, and the famous Aberfan cluster of 1966 (Eryl Mai Jones).
Hans Bender (1907–1991) – psychologist in Freiburg, founded in 1950 the Institute for Border Areas of Psychology and Mental Hygiene (IGPP) and from 1954 held the only regular German university chair for "Border Areas of Psychology" ever. Correspondent of C. G. Jung, Wolfgang Pauli and J. B. Rhine, practical partner of Gerard Croiset, leader of the 1967/68 Rosenheim poltergeist investigation with the MPI plasma physicists Karger and Zicha. For four decades the public face of serious German-language parapsychology; the IGPP exists to this day.
Charles Robert Richet (1850–1935): Sorbonne Professor of Physiology, Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology 1913 for the discovery of anaphylaxis, SPR President 1905, director of the Paris Institut Général Psychologique. Coined the terms "métapsychique", "ectoplasm", "telekinesis" and "cryptesthesia". His 800-page Traité de Métapsychique (1922) remains, a hundred years later, the most systematic survey of the pre-Rhine phase of psi research. With the Palladino investigations, the Eva C. episode (critically framed) and the 1919 founding of the IMI in Paris.
Eugene Paul Wigner – Hungarian-American theorist, Nobel Prize in Physics 1963 for symmetry principles in nuclear theory, co-architect of the Manhattan Project (the Hanford reactor with Szilard), 33-year Princeton professor, brother-in-law of Paul Dirac – in 1961 in "Remarks on the Mind-Body Question" made consciousness an unavoidable component of quantum mechanics foundations. His "Wigner's Friend" thought experiment is still discussed today and was sharpened anew in 2018 in the Frauchiger-Renner theorem from ETH Zurich.
Hans-Peter Dürr – PhD under Edward Teller at Berkeley, closest collaborator of Werner Heisenberg at the Munich MPI for Physics, its executive director 1972–1997, Right Livelihood laureate 1987 for his peace work against the Strategic Defense Initiative – became, in the last two decades of his life, the formative German-language voice of a quantum physics that takes consciousness seriously. With his central thesis "There is no matter!" and his late books (Herder, Crotona), Dürr is in the German-speaking world the most important bridge between Heisenberg's original physics and today's consciousness discussion.
Brian David Josephson – Nobel Prize in Physics 1973 at age 33 for the Josephson effect (quantum tunneling between superconductors, basis for SQUID magnetometers and superconducting qubits), Trinity College Cambridge, Cavendish Laboratory – has been publicly active in consciousness research, transcendental meditation and parapsychological research since the 1970s. Director of the "Mind-Matter Unification Project" at the Cavendish. Massive mainstream criticism (Royal Mail 2001, David Deutsch's "utter rubbish") – never retracted. The only living Nobel laureate in physics publicly defending psi research.
Sir Joseph John Thomson – Cavendish Professor at Cambridge (successor to Rayleigh, predecessor of Rutherford), discoverer of the electron in 1897, Nobel Prize Physics 1906, RS President 1915–20, Master of Trinity College 1918–40 – was an SPR member for decades, personally present at the 1895 Cambridge sittings with Eusapia Palladino, and devoted a chapter to the subject in his 1936 autobiography "Recollections and Reflections". Comparison with Lodge and Rayleigh: the same differentiation – telepathy taken seriously, physical mediumship sceptical.
John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh – Cavendish Professor at Cambridge (successor to Maxwell, predecessor of J. J. Thomson), Nobel Prize Physics 1904 for the discovery of argon, originator of Rayleigh scattering ("why the sky is blue"), Master of Trinity College 1908–19, RS President 1905–08 – was also President of the Society for Psychical Research in 1919 and in January 1919 gave a late, methodologically mature presidential address on decades of careful psi research. With the Cambridge Palladino sittings of 1895, the Balfour connection, and the "third position".
Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) – pioneer of wireless telegraphy on a par with Marconi, inventor of the Lodge coherer and the spark plug, Principal of the University of Birmingham, President of the British Association 1913 – was active for decades in the Society for Psychical Research, twice its president, and investigator of Leonora Piper. After the death of his son Raymond on the Western Front in 1915 he published "Raymond, or Life and Death" (1916). For Lodge, radio waves and telepathy were two aspects of the same medium – the aether.
Sir William Crookes (1832–1919) – discoverer of thallium, inventor of the Crookes tube and the radiometer, President of the Royal Society 1913–1915 – investigated the most famous mediums of his time in his private London laboratory between 1869 and 1875: Daniel Dunglas Home (levitations, accordion in a cage, weight variations) and Florence Cook (materialisations, "Katie King"). In 1871 he published the "Psychic Force" hypothesis – a still-unknown physical force. He never retracted his findings.
Two years after their joint Nobel Prize in Physics (1903), Pierre and Marie Curie attended from June 1905 a series of sittings in Paris with the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino at the Institut Général Psychologique. In a famous letter to Louis Georges Gouy of 24 July 1905, Pierre wrote of "a whole new domain of facts and physical states of space". A few weeks before his accidental death on 19 April 1906 he was planning a systematic publication. Marie continued until 1907/08, then withdrew.
Albert Einstein wrote the foreword to the 1930 German edition of Upton Sinclair's book "Mental Radio" – a documentation of telepathy experiments between Sinclair and his wife Mary Craig Sinclair. With the actual Einstein quote (rather than the often-invented one), his general stance as a "fourth position" alongside Jung, Pauli and Rhine, and a critical reading of the famous but weakly sourced episodes with Wolf Messing (Vienna 1927) and Gene Dennis (1932).
Kepler (1571–1630) is the textbook figure of the three laws of planetary motion. In the historical original he is also court astrologer in Prague and to Wallenstein, author of some 800 horoscopes, theorist of a geometrically grounded astrology ("Tertius interveniens" 1610), defender of his mother Katharina in the Leonberg witch trial (1615–1621) – and the historical key witness in Wolfgang Pauli's 1952 essay on archetypes in natural science.
Robert G. Jahn, Dean of the Princeton School of Engineering, founded the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research lab (PEAR) with Brenda Dunne in 1979. 28 years of operation, around 2.5 million individual trials with quantum random number generators, the "Random Mechanical Cascade" with 9,000 balls, the Remote Perception program, the combined statistics at Z ≈ 7 and the public closure in 2007 – plus the Bösch-Steinkamp-Boller meta-analysis in the Psychological Bulletin.
Joseph Banks Rhine (1895–1980) turned parapsychology into an experimental discipline. At Duke University in Durham he built the world centre of psi research from 1930 onwards: the Zener cards, the 1933/34 Pearce-Pratt experiment with over 1,800 individual guesses, the 1934 bestseller "Extra-Sensory Perception", the Journal of Parapsychology from 1937, dice telekinesis, the Rhine Research Center to this day. Plus: Louisa Rhine and 14,000 spontaneous cases.
Nobel laureate physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958), a founder of quantum mechanics, collaborated with C. G. Jung for more than two and a half decades. From the legendary Pauli effect through some 1,500 documented dreams (including the famous "World Clock" vision) to the joint 1952 book "Naturerklärung und Psyche" with the concept of synchronicity and the unus-mundus thesis – a Nobel Prize in physics at the border of the paranormal.
C. G. Jung's entire psychiatric career began with séance protocols of his 15-year-old cousin Helene "Helly" Preiswerk. The sittings between 1894 and 1899 became his 1902 Basel dissertation "On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena" – and later the theory of complexes, the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Plus: the Red Book (Liber Novus), the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos and synchronicity.
Portrait of Swiss medium Dolly Röschli (b. 1975 in Wyssachen/Emmental): trained at Arthur Findlay College, full-time in her own practice in the Zurich Oberland since 2003, bestselling book "Hallo, Jenseits" (Wörterseh Verlag 2018) and unusually present in Swiss mainstream media (SRF Sternstunde Religion, Glanz & Gloria, Tele Züri).
Why Switzerland is the European centre for mediumship: two roots rarely told together – the Alpine folk tradition ("Wenden", "Le Secret", state-recognised cultural heritage since 2012) and urban Spiritualism since 1850 (C. G. Jung, Basel, Zurich). Plus the legal reason: the absence of a Heilpraktiker-style restrictive law. With links to Sam Hess, Pascal Voggenhuber, Christina von Dreien, Anouk Claes/Bösch and Martin Zoller.
Portrait of the young Swiss bestselling author Christina von Dreien (b. 2001 in the Toggenburg). Her own team, sold-out lectures, a YouTube audience in the hundreds of thousands. Five-volume "Christina" series at Govinda Verlag (volume 5, "Der Ungehorsam der Liebe", she wrote herself), plus the standalone "Christinas Herzbotschaften". Core message: Freedom, Truth, Love – and "Consciousness creates peace".
Portrait of Swiss medium Sam Hess: 35 years a forester, clairvoyant from childhood, raised in the old Alpine tradition of seers and healers. Books at AT Verlag, documentary films ("Fenster zum Jenseits", "Die weisse Arche") and his central message: "There is no death".
The claim "the brain produces consciousness" is presented as established fact – but it is an unproven conjecture. A methodological walk-through: what a correlation logically permits, the frog joke, the receiver model, the hard problem (Chalmers) and why the underlying materialism no longer holds even in fundamental physics.
Insights from an ICU nurse based on her five-year clinical study at Morriston Hospital. Learn about the famous "Lollipop Case" of veridical perception and how near-death experiences permanently transform the lives of those affected.
Stargate was not the only one. A comparative overview of state psi programs in the Soviet Union (Bekhterev, Vasiliev, Naumov, KGB psychotronics), China (EHF, Tsinghua, Yan Xin), the United Kingdom (MoD study 2001/2002), as well as Czechoslovakia, France and Israel – with documentary record, focus areas and sources.
23 years, five US presidencies, around USD 20 million budget – and in 2017 declassified with 12 million pages of files. The story of the Stargate program: SCANATE, SRI, Ingo Swann, Joe McMoneagle (Legion of Merit), General Dozier, Skylab, Typhoon class – plus the 1995 AIR report by Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman.
Who is Pascal Voggenhuber? A portrait of the Swiss bestselling author, his training at Arthur Findlay College, his time with the police, and his philosophy of evidence-based mediumship.
Why mediumship research stays marginal despite a solid evidence base – two documented historical strands: Helen Duncan's 1944 Witchcraft Act conviction and the CIA's 23-year Stargate program, declassified in 2017 with 12 million pages of files. Plus the academic marginalisation reconstructed by Andreas Sommer and felt again by Etzel Cardeña in 2018 with his American Psychologist review.
Christina von Dreien, a well-known medium from Switzerland, outlines the receiver model of consciousness in a short audio piece: the brain is not the producer, but the translator. Her view from a mediumistic perspective – and how it connects to the empirical work of Schwartz, Beischel, Long and Tressoldi.
How Dr. Patrizio Tressoldi (University of Padova) demonstrated in a 2020 meta-analysis covering 18 mediumship experiments over two decades a combined effect at p < 10⁻⁹ – plus his own studies (28 mediums, 100 readings, p = 0.000048) and his notable positioning towards the survival hypothesis.
How Prof. Gary Schwartz (Harvard PhD, formerly Yale) built the VERITAS research program at the University of Arizona, tested prominent US mediums such as John Edward and Allison DuBois – and with his triple-blind transcript procedure provided the methodological skeleton from which Beischel's later quintuple-blind work would grow.
How Dr. Julie Beischel has studied mediums since 2007 at the Windbridge Institute (Tucson, Arizona) under the highest level of blinding seen in experimental research: a quintuple-blind phone protocol, certified research mediums, and significance values down to p = 0.0001 – the methodologically strictest complement to the Glasgow Study.
How Prof. Archie Roy (astronomy, Glasgow) and Tricia Robertson developed a double- and triple-blind protocol between 1996 and 2004 – and refuted the skeptic hypothesis that "mediumistic statements apply to anyone" with a chance probability of around one in a million.
In his bestseller "Evidence of the Afterlife", Dr. Jeffrey Long presented nine scientific lines of evidence for an afterlife, based on more than 1,600 analyzed near-death experiences. We summarize his key findings.
Why Great Britain is the motherland of modern Spiritualism, how Spiritualist Churches are maintained, and what makes the Arthur Findlay College so unique.
Arthur Findlay College at Stansted Hall is considered the world's leading centre for mediumship. Learn about its history, training, and its striking resemblance to Hogwarts.
How Martin Zoller located a plane that crashed in the Bolivian jungle in 1999 using Remote Viewing, which official search parties had been unable to find for days – making it possible to rescue several survivors.
Isabel Allende's novel between mediumship and history: Clara's magia blanca, the house as a resonant space, magical realism instead of karma – and the torture cell where Clara appears to Alba and binds her to write.
Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon: We analyse the series' concept of "earthbound souls", compare fiction with the reality of mediumistic work, and show why the show helped de-stigmatize communication with the afterlife.
The movie Ghost is more than Hollywood kitsch. We analyse the portrayal of afterlife communication, the role of medium Oda Mae Brown, and the accuracy of its depiction of mediumistic phenomena.
What is remote viewing? From the CIA Stargate program (1972–1995) and the Stanford Research Institute via Joe McMoneagle and Ingo Swann to Birgit Fischer's account on the {ungeskriptet} by Ben podcast (from 1:21:20): method, history, the Find Me Group's multi-viewer protocol – and what distinguishes remote viewing from classical mediumship.
Portrait of English medium and teacher Mavis Pittilla (1933–2023): more than 60 years of practice, decades of teaching at Arthur Findlay College, mentor to Gordon Smith, Tony Stockwell, Janet Nohavec and many others. With teaching philosophy (vocation not stage, relationship to the spirit world, responsibility toward the bereaved) and placement in mediumship research.
Profile of Scottish medium Gordon Smith: from a barber in Glasgow to a tutor at Arthur Findlay College, with the years-long statistical studies by Prof. Archie Roy and Tricia Robertson at the University of Glasgow (Journal of the SPR, 2001/2004). With method description, Smith's style (names, addresses, highly specific details), comparison to Lazar/Beischel/Schwartz and a critical perspective.
The EREAMS study by Oliver Lazar in detail: 243 participants from six countries, two mediums, a waiting phase as methodological filter, highly specific evidence as the gold standard – over 90 % authenticity and 96 % comforting impact. With comparison to Schwartz, Beischel and Tressoldi and an honest discussion of strengths and limitations.
The 2001 Lancet study in detail: 344 patients at ten Dutch hospitals, prospective multicentre design, 18 % NDE incidence, the "dentures case", long-term follow-up over 8 years, and the decisive finding that personality change occurs only in the NDE group – not in the control group with the same cardiac arrest.
Portrait of US psychiatrist Bruce Greyson (University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies): 45 years of NDE research, the Greyson NDE Scale (1983) as the worldwide standard, 27 years as editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, IANDS co-founder and author of "After" (2021). With his central findings on long-term after-effects and veridical perception.
Reconstruction of the 1991 standstill operation at the Barrow Neurological Institute: body temperature 10 °C, stopped heart, blood drained from the head, flat EEG, absent brainstem potentials. Reynolds reported perceptions during this phase that Spetzler and the surgical team confirmed. With critical discussion of Woerlee's anaesthesia-awareness counter-hypothesis.
On the 4th floor of the Basel Land Psychiatric Clinic, the door sign "Head physician Dr. Jakob Bösch" sat next to one reading "Healer" – this is where medium Anouk Claes worked. A documented case of integrative psychiatry in the German-speaking world, with sources from DLF, SRF/3sat and Wikipedia, and the UK comparison: since 1985 the NHS has paid for energetic healing on a doctor's prescription.
Harald Lesch and Josef M. Gaßner explain why elementary particles in the Standard Model must be massless, why the equations would otherwise yield probabilities above 100 %, and how the Higgs field produces what we measure as mass. Plus: 99 % of the proton's mass is QCD binding energy – not "stuff".
Summary of the interview with Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar (FOM Düsseldorf) on his EREAMS study: 243 participants, two mediums, highly specific evidence – over 90 % authenticity and 96 % comforting impact. Plus: the personal starting point and two independent confirmations by mediums.
Five historical cases in which the majority stood against the experts and lost – and why today's AI systems reproduce the same bias, because they weight by frequency rather than expertise. Applied to the NDE debate.
Summary of the lecture by Prof. Dr. Dr. Godehard Brüntrup SJ (Munich School of Philosophy): five philosophical strategies for dealing with NDEs, the puzzle of perception during flat-line EEG, patterns hard to explain in evolutionary terms, and the NDE as a mystical experience.
Summary of the Thanatos TV interview with neurologist Prof. Wilfried Kuhn (department head Schweinfurt, Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung e.V.): why the hallucination label falls short, why endorphins fail as an explanation, flat-line EEG and the puzzling gamma peak shortly before death.
Summary of the 1981 television interview with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: the moment of death as a liberating experience, blind patients describing colours, and the children study – "in ten years no child has ever given me a wrong name".
A summary of the interview with Aachen-based physician and scientist Prof. Walter van Laack: why oxygen-deprivation, drug and hallucination explanations fall short, documented flat-line EEG cases, and what clearly distinguishes NDEs from dreams.
Hans Christian Andersen's Christmas tale (1845) in full – with a short note on the soul-leaving-the-body motif at the end: the grandmother receives the child in the light.
How police authorities cooperate with mediums – illustrated by Pascal Voggenhuber (Switzerland), Gerard Croiset (Netherlands) and the Etta Smith / Melanie Uribe case (USA). Plus: why Germany officially does not work with mediums – and how it still happens in practice.
Typical price ranges for mediumship readings in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (€80–250), the factors that drive the price, and red flags around dumping and price-gouging.
Training paths from development circles to Arthur Findlay College, foundational exercises for the four clair-senses, and realistic timelines on the path to your own mediumistic practice.
Introduction to trance mediumship: the difference from mental mediums and channeling, light and deep trance, the typical flow of a trance session and how to recognise a reputable trance medium.
How a mediumship reading typically unfolds: preparation, the typical phases (building the connection, identification, messages), duration, costs and what to look for when choosing a medium.
