Esalen CTR Home Esalen CTR Conference Summaries Menu

 

The Survival of Bodily Death
Tenth Annual Conference
May 25 to 30, 2008

Introduction

Every spring for the past ten years a group of scholars has gathered at Esalen Institute to inquire into one of the greatest mysteries of all time: what happens to us after we die? In May 2008 nearly all of the regular participants attended along with a few new members who contributed some interesting perspectives to the overall conversation. The following conference summary provides a brief overview of the discussions that happened during this week. Because this is an ongoing conference series, this summary builds upon and makes periodic reference to summaries from previous meetings. The reader is thus encouraged to look at the content from previous years to help flesh out some of the several complicated issues that are involved with both the research and theory concerning the hypothesis that some kind of "personalized consciousness" survives bodily death.

In recent years this group of scholars has turned its focus to look at how to create a viable theory (or new metaphysical system, or new worldview) that is capable of bringing intelligibility to an array of empirical data suggestive of the survival of bodily death. This data spans a range of reports and phenomena that include: near-death experiences, multiple personality disorder, the possible existence of subtle dimensions or worlds, mediums who can communicate with dead spirit beings, telepathy, clairvoyance, and the spontaneous appearance of dramatic bodily changes like stigmata. Many of these phenomena are described in the book Irreducible Mind, written by Ed Kelly and others from this group.

Of course, creating a more encompassing theory that can rationally account for such a vast range of data is no small task. As Eric Weiss said at one point during the conference, the data suggestive of survival is more radical than the still inscrutable data that led to the quantum and relativity revolutions in the first part of the 20th century. Today, approximately 75 years after these revolutions, scientists are still unable to create a broadly agreed upon GUTs theory-a grand unified theory of all the known physical forces of the universe. Thus, Weiss suggested that given that the survival data is even "weirder" than that of non-local electrons, infinitesimal quarks, and dark matter, then we must think much grander to be able to encompass the survival data into a larger worldview that brings coherence to it. A different way to put this is that we live in an age between worldviews: the modern scientific worldview is running out of gas (literally and figuratively), and yet we have no other worldview to take its place. One of the central goals of Esalen's Center for Theory and Research (CTR) is to make sure this Survival of Bodily Death conference series contributes its knowledge and wisdom to the larger project of forming a new worldview for the 21st century and beyond.

Monday

On Monday morning the conference facilitators Adam Crabtree and Ed Kelly gave a brief overview of the conference agenda. Kelly mentioned that Irreducible Mind, published in 2007, was currently selling beyond expectations and will likely to come out in a paperback version sometime in the near future.

Eric Weiss gave the first formal presentation of the conference, in which he summarized some of the major points he made in a DVD lecture series that the group watched beforehand. At the current time, this lecture series by Weiss is being transferred into a book to be co-authored by Weiss andedited by Christian De Quincey. Over the past several years, Weiss has developed a metaphysical vision he thinks is capable of accounting for the survival data in a coherent way. In this venture he has drawn on the work of A. N. Whitehead, Sri Aurobindo, and Jean Gebser. On Monday morning Weiss only had time to touch on a few key points essential to his overall theory. First, he said that all worldviews, metaphysical systems, cosmologies, or big visions, are told as stories-that is, as overarching narratives that bring coherence to a culture. Currently, the big story of modern science is simply not working, yet we still live within its assumptions, as it informs the very fabric of our modern civilization. But the survival data is completely anomalous to this worldview, so we must move beyond it. Second, Weiss drew from the work of Jean Gebser (The Ever-Present Origin) as he noted that humanity must re-awaken our long atrophied capacity for magical and mythical imagination. For a concise summary of Gebser's work by Weiss from a separate CTR conference, please click here.

It is in the magical and mythical modes of consciousness that humanity developed the perceptual resources that we now need in forming an understanding of reincarnation and personality survival. Weiss said modern science has repressed the magical and mythical dimension of human experience, and we need to revive it as part of the emerging integral world vision or new theory. Lastly, Weiss said that we must expect the move into a new world vision to take some serious mental and spiritual effort because we are so strongly conditioned by the modern scientific view. This last point cannot be emphasized enough. The task of challenging our own deeply grained assumptions has come up repeatedly in this conference series. For more detailed expositions of Weiss' theory for the survival hypothesis, please see his presentations from previous years. For his presentation in 2004, click here.

For his presentation in 2005, click here.

For his presentation in 2006, click here.

For his dissertation on Subtle Worlds, click on this external web link:

http://www.ericweiss.com/SubtleWorlds/?submit=Read

On Monday afternoon Bob Rosenberg and Stephen Braude made a number of comments regarding how to build a viable theory. Rosenberg went first by looking back at the metaphysical origins of modern science. Spurred by E. A. Burtt's comment that "It has, no doubt, been worth the metaphysical barbarism of a few centuries to possess modern science," he went looking for lessons or direction for our seminar in the intellectual upheavals of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries that led to that barbarism. He found none beyond the oft-noted Western turn to the measurable, mechanistic, and physical. Even the Aristotelian notion of final cause, frequently interpreted as teleology and used as the retreat of psychical researchers when other causes proved inadequate, had entirely different meanings--for early modern thinkers it was God's business; for Aristotle it was more subtle than the intent of the doer. Rosenberg did point out, as he had before, that there were useful analogies in the history of science--notably in the late nineteenth-century conflict between physicists and geologists over the age of the earth, in which incommensurable bodies of evidence became coherent only with the utterly unexpected discovery of radioactivity.

Next, Stephen Braude made a few key points about the nature of theories, psychological explanation in particular, and scientific explanations in general. First, he said that causation is an essentially pragmatic concept, and that causal explanations must always satisfy some contextually based need to understand (just as requests for directions can be satisfied only in forms appropriate to the requester). He said that is why it usually isn't a good answer to the question "What was the cause of the boat sinking?" to say "because it filled with water." As far as the survival hypothesis is concerned, Braude urged that it would be a mistake to think that causal explanations must have a certain form--for example, an analytic or bottom-up form useful in many areas of the physical sciences. Second, Braude challenged the tendency toward explanatory reductionism, in which scientists often argue that it is possible to explain higher-level phenomena like consciousness by lower-level operations like neurotransmitters. Braude said this type of reductionism is highly problematic, and that when explaining psychological or behavioral phenomena, only a quite different sort of explanation provides real understanding. In those cases, he said we need to explain behavior in terms of an "action space" of possibilities, of things that persons generally, and the person in question specifically, would do in various circumstances. Lastly, Braude invited the group to embrace explanatory and methodological pluralism. Because there are often multiple illuminating perspectives one can take on any given event or data set, we need to approach the world with multiple methods and approaches that can light up different facets of the complex universe we live in. As he closed, Braude mentioned his recently published book The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations. To learn more about it, click on this external weblink: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/#gllady

In the evening, neuroscientist Ed Kelly discussed some technical points about Whitehead's metaphysical scheme, particularly as expressed in David Ray Griffin's article, "Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective." First, Kelly said that even if reality is parsed out as drops of experience, then there still remains the thorny issue of how continuity is to be established among these atomistic drops. Second, Kelly brought attention to the so-called "aggregates vs. compounds" issue. If all actual occasions are alive with subjective experience, then how do we distinguish between a dead lump of stuff (an aggregate) and an organized compound (a living organism)? Third, Kelly also noted the problematic issue of communication between the lower and higher levels of actual occasions in Whitehead's scheme. For example, what is really being communicated when the cells in someone's skin make a blister in response to the person's hypnotic trance (so-called hypnotic blisters)? How do the higher level occasions that comprise a person's mind downwardly communicate to the lower level occasions in the cells of that person's arm? Kelly raised these three issues as challenges to the Whiteheadian scheme. Unfortunately, Eric Weiss was unable to respond due to his need to leave the conference early, but if the reader is interested in delving into these issues further, the above mentioned essay by David Ray Griffin is recommended. Ed Kelly said he is open in principle to a Whiteheadian theory to account for the data described in Irreducible Mind, but he maintains that such a theory must answer these three tough questions (among others) with coherent and persuasive answers. Furthermore, it is still a goal and not a realized accomplishment to claim that Whitehead's scheme is fully compatible with quantum physics. Overall, too often Whitehead's metaphysical scheme seems to offer us only "promissory Whiteheadianism"-to coin a phrase that echoes the "promissory materialism" of current neuroscience. And thus Ed Kelly cautioned that this conference series still has a lot of real work ahead as it searches for a clearly articulated and fully convincing metaphysical scheme capable of accounting for the data in Irreducible Mind.

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning the quantum physicist Harald Atmanspacher presented to this group for the first time. He gave an overview of Wolfgang Pauli's life and his long relationship to Carl Jung. These two great thinkers had an interesting dialogue about how Jung's notion of a collective unconscious and Pauli's view of holistic quantum realism might have a deeper source or origin, which they sometimes called the unus mundus (or world soul). The unus mundus might be the source of both the archetypes of the collective unconscious and the quantum events that are understood according to mathematical laws. After describing Pauli's life in detail, Atmanspacher referenced an interesting letter written by Pauli dated from January 1948, in which he wrote that matter and the laws of the universe could both be understood as the physical manifestations of deeper archetypal structures. And thus Pauli further speculated in the letter that each scientific law might also have an inner or psychic correspondence. After reading this letter, Atmanspacher said he agrees with Pauli that there is likely a deeper common source for both the mental processes studied by Jung and the material world studied by science. Both mind and matter could be unified at a deeper level that we are only beginning to understand. As a newcomer to this conference series, Atmanspacher noted that he is open in principle to assessing the controversial data presented in Ed Kelly's book Irreducible Mind, but he cautioned that the ability to verify this data reliably will take many years. In Atmanspacher's view, science proceeds in small steps and we should put our attention on finding the most concrete and verifiable steps that can be made next.

As he closed, Atmanspacher mentioned that some of his papers that explore these issues further can found at these two weblinks:

http://www.igpp.de/english/tda/info.htm

http://www.mindmatter.de/

On Tuesday afternoon David Presti gave an overview of quantum physics, molecular biology, and 20th century science in general. He began by showing a complicated slide image that seemed like just a blotch of black dots, but as it turned out, there was an image in the slide that most people in the room could only recognize after it was pointed out to them. Presti said that for nearly everyone who has done this experiment after seeing the image, it is almost impossible not to see it. The conclusion: perception is strongly conditioned by what we bring to the perceptual act. Our own knowledge, expectations, and cognitive orientation shapes how we perceive reality. Next, Presti gave an overview of many key events in the history of 20th-century physics and molecular biology. For example, he mentioned the consequential Solvay Congress in 1927 that Einstein, Bohr, and many other quantum physicists attended. He then traced a number of the key steps from quantum physics to the discovery of DNA, particularly through the work of Erwin Schrodinger and Max Dellbruck. Extending the hypothesis of molecular explanation into the realm of mind science, Presti introduced the notion of a "Standard Model" in neuroscience: that mental experience is completely determined by some sort of higher-order interpretation of cellular and molecular processes in the brain. Overall, Presti's main point was to highlight how the awesome successes of 20th-century science, and the metaphysical framework of scientific materialism upon which it is founded, make it very difficult to argue that the Standard Model perspective may be greatly limited in its capacity to address issues related to the nature of consciousness. As he concluded, Presti noted that a paper he co-authored with Alan Wallace and Arthur Zajonc, "Toward a Revolution in the Mind Sciences," will be published soon in the book A Natural Scientist: The Dalai Lama Thinks About Science. In short, this paper values the approach of contemporary neuroscience and molecular biology but also calls for it to be integrated with the first-person approach of William James and the Eastern mystical traditions. A paper on the notion of the Standard Model and thinking beyond it will be published as a review essay on Irreducible Mind later this year in the Journal of Near-Death Studies.

In the evening two first-time participants in this conference series co-presented, Jeff Kripal and Bertrand Méheust. Kripal started by mentioning a few key points that are at the center of his book-in-progress titled, Authors of the Impossible. First, Kripal drew attention to the issue of interpretation. The Greek god of interpretation-Hermes-is a trickster god, which suggests something important Kripal said. The paranormal data at the heart of this conference is something of a trickster that must always be interpreted carefully. Kripal suggested that scientists who dismiss the evocative power of the interpretive act will never truly understand the paranormal data. Instead, they will always be caught in the fallacy that there is "objective data" existing independently of those who interpret it. Drawing an analogy to quantum physics, Kripal suggested that paranormal data is always influenced and evoked by the experimenter-interpreter who seeks to understand it. What we consider paranormal data only becomes data in the first place by means of the epistemological approach taken by the scientists themselves. Second, Kripal noted how his own academic field of religious studies ignores the realm of the paranormal. For example, the well-respected and multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion, originally edited by Mircea Eliade, has no entry for it at all. Third, Kripal said that the academic field most open to the paranormal is anthropology, because field anthropologists see first-hand some of the paranormal phenomena of indigenous cultures. Overall, Kripal's main point was that paranormal data exists in something of a middle realm between the subjective approach of the humanities and the objective approach of the sciences. Thus, like Hermes, the paranormal is a trickster that beguiles the preferred epistemologies of both these camps. And thus, unfortunately, the paranormal has yet to find a home in higher academia.

The French historian of the paranormal Bertrand Méheust spoke next. Although Méheust had participated in a separate Esalen conference series on the history of Western esotericism, he was joining this group for the first time. In 1997 he published a hefty two-volume work in French titled, Somnambulisme et médiumnité, which gives a historical account of paranormal phenomena in France from 1780 to 1930 approximately. One of the goals of Jeff Kripal's forthcoming book Authors of the Impossible is to introduce some of Méheust's ideas to English speaking audiences. Working as a team, Kripal and Méheust made a number of interesting points to the group. First, they noted that the paranormal was at the core of French intellectual life for most of the 19th century but then was marginalized by various intellectual movements in the 20th century (such as Freudianism, deconstructionism, etc.). This sociological observation is a strong confirmation of Michael Murphy's thesis of "broken lineages," in which movements that study and explore the paranormal sprout up in history and then die-out without leaving an enduring institutional legacy (hence, the lineages are broken and must be re-discovered by later generations). Second, Kripal said one of Méheust's most fascinating and productive ideas is called "buffer zones." This means that mainstream societies unwittingly create softer cultural buffers against the extremes of the alternative or counter-culture. In history such buffer zones have both defended against the paranormal as well as helped to gently assimilate it into the mainstream culture in a way that is more tolerable. A good example of an alternative cultural outlet in American society is the comic book industry, which has served as a lively and controversial buffer zone where the paranormal can be explored and celebrated at the fringes of society. In the past few decades in America many comic books have been turned into mainstream movies (Batman, Spiderman, etc.), which have acted as a further medium by which the paranormal is gently introduced into the larger cultural mind-set. Third, another important idea that Méheust describes in his book is called décrire-construire, or loosely translated, "to describe is to construct." The central idea here is that intellectual and social practices "switch on" and "switch off" a vast latent set of possibilities within human nature. The full spectrum of human experience can never be exhausted by one cultural context alone, thus each culture switches on a select range of our potentials at the expense of others. Unfortunately, nearly all cultures make the unwarranted assumption that the particular potentials that they accept are the only ones that are "real." Kripal said that this observation can be extended into a so-called "metaphysics of history," by which historians might recognize that during different historical epochs different human potentials and realities become possible. If we accept this view to be true, then it helps makes sense of an observation made by those who study the paranormal: that the robustness of paranormal phenomena differ radically in different ages. For example, the table-turning and mediumistic communication during the hey-day of mid-19th century Spiritualism is simply not happening today. That was a different historical period with a different metaphysical and cultural ambience, which resulted in a different set of human potentials coming forth. If we don't recognize this key point, we will be left bewildered regarding the uneven distribution of paranormal activity across cultures and historical epochs. Lastly, Méheust concluded with some observations of contemporary France. He said that due to the lingering scar of 20th European fascism, the paranormal is treated with a great deal of trepidation in French intellectual circles. The unfortunate inference is too often made that exploration of the paranormal will necessarily lead to ego-driven power-plays, or perhaps even evil. As a result, the cultural treatment of the paranormal has withered in France since World War II. Méheust's book is thus a contribution to the return of a balanced treatment of the paranormal potentials harbored deep within humanity.

Wednesday

On Wednesday morning Buddhist scholar David Gray gave a brief overview of the Mahayana Buddhist (particularly Tibetan) perspective on the death process and life beyond the physical body. This was the first time in this conference series that the Tibetan perspective on life after death was represented so it was a great opportunity to begin to integrate this view with the ideas of Frederic Myers, William James, and A. N. Whitehead, which have been so influential on the group's approach thus far. Gray started his talk by noting that the Buddhist model for life after death has a number of similarities to the Whiteheadian one discussed by Eric Weiss. Both emphasize that reality can be understood as fleeting moments of experience. In Whitehead's terminology these fleeting moments are called actual occasions, while in the Theravada Buddhist model they are called bhavanga. Next, Gray said that because Buddhism originated in response to the ancient Hinduism of India, it has tended to emphasize the doctrine of an-Atman, or no-self. But just because there is no radically separate self according to Buddhism does not entail that there is no soul. Gray said a slightly different way to get at this important distinction is to realize that Hinduism started with Atman (the Self with a capital "S") and then gradually realized the inherent impermanence of the Self. While Buddhism, in contrast, started with no-self and then gradually realized that there must be some kind of "soul" that transmigrates from life to life carrying karma. Thus, although historically speaking, Hinduism and Buddhism started on different ends of the spectrum, over the course of their long development they seem to have come to the recognition that human spiritual experience paradoxically reveals the truth of both the Self as well as the no-Self. As Gray continued, he described Mahayana Buddhism's emphasis on dynamism, process, and inter-connectivity (hence its similarity to Whitehead). For advanced meditators in particular, reality can be experience directly as a dynamic, flowing, network of inter-relations. Gray then turned to the Tibetan view of the various subtle bodies or layers that surround the physical body. When we die, these layers "drop-off" one by one. So, broadly speaking, the gross physical body drops off first, then the mental body, and then the light body, and so forth. According to the Yogachara school, there are at least eight of these layers, and only the eighth completely survives physical death. This is called the alaya vijnana, which is vaguely comparable to the "soul" in Western terminology. Gray said that all analogies are limited, but one way to think about the alaya vijnana is as a filter or pattern through which the Clear Light projects or shines through to create reality as we know it. One interesting point Gray made is that after death we experience ourselves in our mind-made bodies, or mano-maya kaya. This is a subtle body generated by our thought patterns. While in this body, whatever we think about, we will immediately see, which is why a disciplined and prepared mind can be so helpful at the moment of death. Lastly, Gray noted that because so many Tibetan masters have directly experienced the generative quality of mental states, they have come to maintain that every state of mind brings forth a world or cosmos. To put this succinctly, in Tibetan Buddhism every state of mind is a state of cosmology. Each mental state constitutes or co-arises with an exterior world or cosmos. For example, the mind of a young child arises with a corresponding child-like "world" suitable to him or her. And thus this basic principle can be extended to see that all states of mind correspond with worlds. According to Tibetan Buddhism, the existence of "subtle dimensions" or "subtle worlds" is just a natural extension of this view. In the West, however, we have radically separated psychology from cosmology, and therefore it is more challenging for us to accept that there might be subtle dimensions or worlds naturally correlating with all states of mind. After all, what this implies is that our own physical world is to some degree a production of our collective mind state here on earth. Our physical world is not so solid and material after all; instead it is a mental construction according to the Tibetan Buddhist perspective.

Following David Gray, another first-time participant in the survival conference, the religious studies scholar Greg Shaw, gave a presentation about the fascinating ideas of an ancient Greek shaman-mystic named Iamblichus, who lived approximately from 245 to 325 A.D. Shaw said that in a number of extant books we have accounts of Iamblichus' quite detailed and elaborate conception of the subtle bodies that surround the physical human body. Thus, Iamblichus offers this conference series a complementary perspective to the Tibetan model and to Eric Weiss' Whiteheadian model for how these bodies function during the death process. According to Shaw, a number of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers employed a quite sophisticated vocabulary to describe the subtle bodies. For example, the Greek word for "vehicle of the soul" was ochêma, while the slightly longer phrase augoeides ochêma meant "the vehicle of light." Iamblichus used these terms to describe the many layers of experience that an ochêma traverses when a human dies, is incarnated, and during the soul's embodied life. As the conference participants listened to Shaw's descriptions of Iamblichus and other ancient philosophers, they learned that the milieu of antiquity included a number of sophisticated schools and practices for what we might today call "shamanic journeying" or the "astral travel" of Robert Monroe. During his presentation, Shaw made it clear that Iamblichus viewed the human soul as intimately connected to the cosmos. Hence, the phrase "astral body" refers to the way the soul's ochêma was understood to be composed of the same stuff (aither) as the stars themselves. Another interesting point Shaw made was that the ancient Greek word "ecstasy" literally means "to stand outside yourself," thus implying that out-of-body travel was the experience that led to the coining of this term. Toward the end of Shaw's presentation, a group discussion arose concerning how in some spiritual teachings the role of the mythic imagination is more prominent than in others. Shaw said that for Iamblichus the mythic imagination was crucial to the process of spiritual growth and mystical awakening. Iamblichus thought that the human imagination can participate in revealing the gods' presence in our world. These comments echoed what both Eric Weiss and Jeff Kripal had already said in the conference, namely that the mythical mode of consciousness is a crucial (perhaps even essential) component when engaging the paranormal. Overall, Shaw said that although Iamblichus is long since dead, he offers us a nuanced understanding of the different subtle bodies and is therefore another resource for this group's quest to understand what happens after we die.

On Wednesday afternoon Bill Barnard led the group in a discussion of David Skrbina's book Panpsychism in the West. Panpsychism is the philosophical view that some degree of mentality (subjectivity, sentience, aliveness) is widespread in nature, perhaps stretching all the way down to atoms and even sub-atomic levels. For the survival hypothesis to be true, some kind of mentality must be capable of independent functioning after it detaches from a person's physical body. Thus, this conference is interested in understanding how panpsychism might serve as a more "survival-friendly" worldview in comparison to the prominent alternatives of reductive materialism or emergentist materialism. As Barnard reviewed Skrbina's book, he noted that many prominent scientists have agreed with the panpsychist view over the years. This list includes: Sir Authur Eddington, J.B.S. Haldane, Sir James Jeans, and David Bohm, to mention a few. Bohm, for example, proposed that there is a non-localized panpsychic realm called the "implicate order" that underlies and informs the entire physical world. Bohm proposed this panpsychist view in response to experiments that reveal an instantaneous connectedness at the quantum level that defies well-established physical laws (such as the inability for any signal to travel faster than the speed of light). Next, Barnard mentioned an issue that Ed Kelly had already raised on Monday night, which is often called the "combination problem." This concerns how a coherent higher level individual entity can arise from the combination of lower level entities. From the panpsychist view, if everything has mind, then how do higher functioning minds arise from lower functioning minds? One approach to this problem is the idea that somehow a dominant agency emerges at higher levels of psycho-physical organization that can then downwardly influence lower levels contained within it. For example, my own mind can downwardly influence the cells in my hand to make it rise up or down-or, my mind can influence those same cells to create a stigmata or blister while I am under hypnosis or in an altered state of consciousness. According to this way of viewing things, higher levels of dominance or agency come into being that are capable of directly causing lower levels to organize in a particular way. Some panpsychists, like Whitehead, think this can be explained by postulating dominant occasions of a higher grade. But precisely what a dominant occasion of a higher grade is has not been made clear to all the members of this conference (hence, Ed Kelly's challenges to Eric Weiss mentioned on Monday night). Lastly, after Barnard reviewed some of the other features of the panpsychist worldview, he briefly mentioned his own affinity for the panpsychism of Henri Bergson. Currently, Barnard is writing an extensive exposition of Bergson's ideas, which Barnard thinks have much to offer the contemporary conversation about the survival hypothesis and paranormal data, etc. Barnard has presented a number of Bergson's ideas at various Esalen conferences over the past few years, so if the reader is interested in learning more about Bergson, please click here.

Conclusion

On the final day of the conference the group discussed a number of "postulates" or "working hypotheses" that might act as a foundational orientation for the group's ongoing work. The conversation was preliminary only, and the group will follow up on it the next time it meets.

As the conference closed, Adam Crabtree summarized some key directions for the future of this group:

First, Eric Weiss will work with Christian De Quincey to write and publish a book that articulates Weiss' Whiteheadian-Aurobindonian approach to the survival hypothesis.

Second, Adam Crabtree with the group's help will work on a lexicon of key terms for this conference to aid clarity of discussion. Crabtree will also investigate the work of C.S. Peirce to see if that might aid the theory-building effort.

Third, the group as a whole will continue to discuss and refine a list of key postulates or working hypotheses.

Fourth, the group will continue to explore additional theories to the one Eric Weiss is developing, particularly looking at how a theory could be developed that extends Frederic Myers' work in Human Personality.

Fifth, more work will be done to see how quantum physics can be integrated with various philosophical proposals to make sure that the various theories stay close to the scientific evidence of physics.

Sixth, the group will continue to entertain the full range of human experience and assess the empirical weight of different data domains, such as parapsychology and psi research.

Seventh, the group will expand its conceptual mission to include three major areas: Area One: Empirical Research. Area Two: Theory Development. Area Three: Cultural History and Sociology of the Paranormal.

This conference will meet again for the eleventh time in May 2009 at Esalen.

For inquiries about Esalen's public workshops and classes, please visit www.esalen.org.
Help
All text, graphics and content of the Esalen CTR website
are Copyright 1999-2010 by Esalen Center for Theory & Research.
All rights reserved.