The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds


Edgar D. Mitchell - 1996
    "Everyone has talked about science and religion . . . but Mitchell has really dug into the main paradoxical issues and comes up with a resolving viewpoint".--Harold E. Puthoff, Ph.D.

The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science & Spirit Together


Charles T. Tart - 2009
    The truth is that unseen forces such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and other phenomena inextricably link us to the spiritual world, and while many skeptics and scientists deny the existence of these spiritual phenomena, the experiences of millions of people indicate that they do take place.In this book, copublished with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart presents over fifty years of scientific research conducted at the nation's leading universities that proves humans do have natural spiritual impulses and abilities. The End of Materialism presents an elegant argument for the union of science and spirituality in light of this new evidence, and explains why a truly rational viewpoint must address the reality of a spiritual world. Tart's work marks the beginning of an evidence-based spiritual awakening that will profoundly influence your understanding of the deeper forces at work in our lives.

The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: New Constructs of Mind and Reality


Joseph Chilton Pearce - 1971
    This logical universe creates a vicious circle of reasoning that robs our minds of power and prevents us from reaching our true potential. To step beyond that circle requires a centering and focus that today's society assaults on every level. Through the insights of Teilhard, Tillich, Jung, Jesus, Carlos Castaneda, and others, Joseph Chilton Pearce provides a mode of thinking through which imagination can escape the mundane shell of current construct reality and leap into a new phase of human evolution.This enormously popular New Age classic is finally available again to challenge the assumptions of a new generation of readers and help them develop their potential through new creative modes of thinking. With a masterful synthesis of recent discoveries in physics, biology, and psychology, Pearce reveals the extraordinary relationship of mind and reality and nature's blueprint for a self-transcending humanity.

The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto


Jane Roberts - 1984
    This book is the story of my efforts to put Seth's material to work in daily life, Roberts writes, to free myself from many hampering cultural beliefs; and most of all, to encounter and understand the nature of impulses . . .What Roberts discovers in the process of this personal journey is her individual connection to the larger consciousness-God. The God of Jane, the God of Joe, the God of Lester, the God of Sarah . . . she writes, An appeal to that God would be an appeal to the portion of the universal creativity from which we personally emerge . . . It would stand for the otherwise inconceivable intersection between Being and our being . . . A new introduction by Susan M. Watkins, author of Conversations with Seth and Speaking of Jane Roberts, provides important biographical and historical information about Roberts and about the time period in which she was producing the Seth material.Jane Roberts (1929-1984) is considered one of the most important psychics of the twentieth century. From 1963 through 1984, Roberts channeled Seth, who described himself as an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical matter, while her husband, Robert Butts, took dictation. In addition to thirteen published books of her own, Roberts channeled nine books by Seth and a wealth of additional unpublished material all of which is housed at the Yale University Archives. Roberts's work has inspired many of the most important figures in the New Age movement and her work has been studied byscientists from all over the world.

A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness: A Cosmic Book on the Mechanics of Creation


Itzhak Bentov - 2000
    • Explains some of the most difficult concepts of physics and heightened consciousness in ways that are easily understood. • Presents a model for the interaction of the universe and human thought that has profound implications for our future. All aboard for the excursion of a lifetime as Itzhak Bentov, the celebrated engineer, inventor, and mystic, takes you on a tour of the universe, pure consciousness, and all that lies beyond. Using comical sketches, simple metaphors, and his famous wit and humor, Bentov explains the nature of reality, points out the sights in Nirvana and the Void, and eventually takes you to a meeting with your higher self. Along the way, Bentov illuminates the Kabbalistic principles of number and sound, the meaning of cosmic shapes and symbols, the consciousness of devas, and the nature of the absolute. Ultimately, he shows that the universe and thought are inseparable, and that the thoughts of all human beings affect each other and in turn the whole universe--an idea with obvious and far-reaching implications. Anyone interested in the inner reaches of the mind, the greater structure of the cosmos, and the spiritual evolution of humanity will find A Brief Tour of Higher Consciousness an informed and delightful traveling companion.

Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation


Mitch Horowitz - 2009
    Americans all, they were among the famous figures whose paths intertwined with the mystical and esoteric movement broadly known as the occult. Brought over from the Old World and spread throughout the New by some of the most obscure but gifted men and women of early U.S. history, this “hidden wisdom” transformed the spiritual life of the still-young nation and, through it, much of the Western world.Yet the story of the American occult has remained largely untold. Now a leading writer on the subject of alternative spirituality brings it out of the shadows. Here is a rich, fascinating, and colorful history of a religious revolution and an epic of offbeat history. From the meaning of the symbols on the one-dollar bill to the origins of the Ouija board, Occult America briskly sweeps from the nation’s earliest days to the birth of the New Age era and traces many people and episodes, including:•The spirit medium who became America’s first female religious leader in 1776 •The supernatural passions that marked the career of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith •The rural Sunday-school teacher whose clairvoyant visions instigated the dawn of the New Age •The prominence of mind-power mysticism in the black-nationalist politics of Marcus Garvey•The Idaho druggist whose mail-order mystical religion ranked as the eighth-largest faith in the world during the Great Depression Here, too, are America’s homegrown religious movements, from transcendentalism to spiritualism to Christian Science to the positive-thinking philosophy that continues to exert such a powerful pull on the public today. A feast for believers in alternative spirituality, an eye-opener for anyone curious about the unknown byroads of American history, Occult America is an engaging, long-overdue portrait of one nation, under many gods, whose revolutionary influence is still being felt in every corner of the globe.

Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality


Dean Radin - 2006
    Others don't believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.Albert Einstein called entanglement "spooky action at a distance" -- the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience.

Words to the Wise: A Practical Guide to the Esoteric Sciences


Manly P. Hall - 2008
    Subtitled "A Practical Guide to the Esoteric Sciences, " this volume examines the teachings of the Mystery Schools, the five steps of self-unfoldment, and how the practice of ancient disciplines can lead to a more purposeful life.

The Reality of ESP: A Physicist's Proof of Psychic Abilities


Russell Targ - 2012
    Desperate to find her, the police called physicist Russell Targ and Pat Price, a psychic retired police commissioner. As Price turned the pages of the police mug book filled with hundreds of photos, suddenly he pointed to one of them and announced, "That's the ringleader." The man was Donald DeFreeze, who was indeed subsequently so identified. Price also described the type and location of the kidnap car, enabling the police to find it within minutes. That remarkable event is one reason Targ believes in ESP. Another occurred when his group made $120,000 by forecasting for nine weeks in a row the changes in the silver-commodity futures marketAs a scientist, Targ demands proof. His experience is based on two decades of investigations at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which he cofounded with physicist Harold Puthoff in 1972. This twenty-million dollar program launched during the Cold War was supported by the CIA, NASA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Army and Air Force Intelligence. The experiments they conducted routinely presented results could have happened by chance less than once in a million. Targ describes four types of experiments:Remote Viewing, in which a person describes places and events independent of space and time. For example, while in California Price drew to scale a Soviet weapons factory at Semipalitinsk with great accuracy later confirmed by Satellite photography. In another remote viewing, Targ accurately sketched an airport in San Andreas, Columbia himself.Distant Mental Influence, where the thoughts of the experimenter can positively or negatively affect the physiology (heart rate, skin resistance, etc.) of a distant person.Whole field isolation, where someone in a state of sensory isolation accurately describes the visual experiences of someone else in another placePrecognition and retrocausality, showing that the future can affect the past. That is, the elephant you see on television in the morning can be the cause of your having dreamed about elephants the previous night.Final chapters present evidence for survival after death; explain how ESP works based on the Buddhist/Hindu view of our selves as nonlocal, eternal awareness; discuss the ethics of exercising psychic abilities,and show us how to explore ESP ourselves. "I am convinced," Targ says, "that most people can learn to move from their ordinary mind to one not obstructed by conventional barriers of space and time. Who would not want to try that?"

Journeys Out of the Body: The Classic Work on Out-Of-Body Experience


Robert A. Monroe - 1971
    With more than 300,000 copies sold to date, this is the definitive work on the extraordinary phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, by the founder of the internationally known Monroe Institute.

Life After Death, Powerful Evidence You Will Never Die


Stephen Hawley Martin - 2015
    He spent two years gathering information that demonstrates this and along the way interviewed more than a hundred experts in a number of different fields. Among them were parapsychologists, medical doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, quantum physicists, and researchers into the true nature of reality. Specific examples are presented that indicate what happens when we die, for example that memories can be formed and retained despite a subject’s brain having been shutdown and the blood drained from it. Questions such as whether or not you will be able to communicate with living loved ones after death are addressed, if it is possible to be reborn, and what might be missing from reproductive theory to explain the various phenomena indicated in the many case histories and scientific investigations presented. All of us will someday cross the border to what Shakespeare called "The undiscovered country." As long as we must make that trip, wouldn’t it be smart to find out where we are going and what to expect when we get there?

Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld


Patrick Harpur - 1994
    But those that aren't, those that purport to document or comment on such phenomena in what passes for "real life" vary across such a wide range of quality, credulity & comprehensibility that it's tempting to dismiss them all as pure badly-written hokum. Of course, as in any genre, no matter how microscopic, there are classics. Charles Fort's Book of the Damned is surely in the forefront. But once you get past the looming shadow of Charles Fort, matters become far murkier. Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality is a work that would surely make the top ten lists of many Fortean scholars. Subtitled A Field Guide to the Otherworld, Daimonic Reality synthesizes the reports of many different phenomena into a single Unified Field Theory of the Strange. It's an audacious attempt that largely succeeds. Harpur has a low key writing style that makes this work easy to read. His comprehensive knowledge of a wide variety of inexplicable events is impressive & entertaining. Most importantly, he has drawn together these disparate elements with a rather interesting philosophical take that looks to Jung, Fort, Blake, Yeats & beyond. There are enough elements in this stew to make it a really tasty treat for the hungry mind. Daimonic Reality is divided into three sections thru which Harpur journeys ever deeper into the mind behind the perceptions. But he's careful not to shortchange the perceptions & events themselves. Part One: Apparitions covers apparitions of all kinds, from UFOs to lights in the sky, from aliens & fairies to sightings of Black Dogs & Big Cats. Harpur's economical coverage of these subjects makes it easy for any level of Fortean reader to enjoy the individuality of each experience. But this treatment also enables the reader to step back & see the bigger picture, to move towards the idea of the otherworld. The individual reports are carefully chosen & beautifully written. Harpur takes a more substantial step towards the otherworld in Part Two: Vision. Starting with a discussion of "seeing things", he moves on to visions of Ladies, which are dominated by (but not exclusively) visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He discusses the evidence that these encounters leave behind, from fairy shoes to crop circles. (Coming soon to a theater near you.) He talked about the part that Imagination plays in the otherworld & finally reaches the mythic land itself. In Part Three: Otherworld Journeys, Harpur gives both practical & philosophical advice for otherworld journeys. He discusses the variety of journeys that one can have, from missing time to alien encounters, from a trip to fairyland to an out-of-body experience. When Harpur sticks to the practical, he has practically no peer in writing compelling prose about otherworldly experiences. His philosophical thoughts aren't quite as page-turning, but they're pithy, fascinating & pertinent. Harpur isn't content to merely provoke thought. He wants to invoke internal debate in the reader, & does so with some formal philosophical discussion that is difficult to pull off with the authority that Harpur achieves. He's a remarkably intelligent writer & his work requires a reader of nearly equal intelligence. You don't have to be a philosopher to read Harpur's work, but it certainly helps to be philosophically inclined. This isn't mere reportage of events, but a reasoned analysis, with conclusions that go well beyond 'Is it real or are they all just a bunch of crazy yahoos?' That there is an audience for this sort of thinking is shown by the eternal sales of the works of writers such as Carlos Castenada, not to mention the immense & increasing popularity of Fortean fiction, horror, science fiction & fantasy. That's because Harpur is looking to snatch something from the center of creation, something that is partly in the human mind & partly in the otherworld. Daimonic Reality does an excellent job grasping at the ineffable & getting it in print. As of 2/2003, this title is back in print by Pine Winds Press/Idyll Arbor. They've chosen an equally nice cover print, & are publishing the book as a sturdy US hardcover. Better yet, they're a small press, so you can buy directly from them. Since Harpur has managed to wrestle the ineffable into print, we've got to thank Pine Winds Press for keeping it in print.--Rick Kleffel

The Immortal Mind: Science and the Continuity of Consciousness beyond the Brain


Ervin Laszlo - 2014
    Conventional science prefers to dismiss these findings because they cannot be accommodated by a materialist view of reality. Spirituality and religion embrace the continuity of consciousness and ascribe it to a nonmaterial spirit or soul that is immortal. As such, spirituality/religion and science continually find conflict in their views. But what if there truly is no conflict? Based on a new scientific paradigm in sync with experience-based spirituality, Ervin Laszlo and Anthony Peake explore how consciousness is continually present in the cosmos and can exist without connection to a living organism. They examine the rapidly growing body of scientific evidence supporting the continuity of consciousness, including near-death experiences, after-death communication, reincarnation, and neurosensory information received in altered states. They explain how the persistence of consciousness beyond the demise of the body means that, in essence, we are not mortal--we continue to exist even when our physical existence has come to an end. This correlates precisely with cutting-edge physics, which posits that things in our plane of time and space are not intrinsically real but are manifestations of a hidden dimension where they exist in the form of superstrings, information fields, and energy matrices. With proof that consciousness is basic to the cosmos and immortal in its deeper, nonmanifest realm, Laszlo and Peake reveal the purpose of consciousness is to manifest in living beings in order to continuously evolve.

The Missing Link Reflections on Philosophy and Spirit


Sydney Banks - 1998
    It reveals a simplicity beneath the complex workings of the mind and the principles behind the creation of our life experience.

Science and the Afterlife Experience: Evidence for the Immortality of Consciousness


Christopher David Carter - 2012
    Focusing on three key phenomena--reincarnation, apparitions, and communications from the dead--Carter reveals 125 years of documented scientific studies by independent researchers and the British and American Societies for Psychical Research that rule out hoaxes, fraud, and hallucinations and prove these afterlife phenomena are real.The author examines historic and modern accounts of detailed past-life memories, visits from the deceased, and communications with the dead via medium and automatic writing as well as the scientific methods used to confirm these experiences. He explains how these findings on the afterlife have been ignored and denied because they are incompatible with the prevailing doctrine of materialism. Sharing messages from the dead themselves describing the afterlife, Carter reveals how consciousness exists outside the parameters of biological evolution and emerges through the medium of the brain to use the physical world as a springboard for growth. After death, souls can advance to higher planes of consciousness or manifest once again on Earth. Carter’s rigorous argument proves--beyond any reasonable doubt--not only that consciousness survives death and continues in the afterlife, but that it precedes birth as well.