The Parapsychological Association

Stephen Braude, PhD, served as chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also served as president of the Parapsychological Association. He is author of Crimes of Reason, The Gold Leaf Lady, Immortal Remains, The Limits of Influence, First Person Plural, and ESP and Psychokinesis. He is the recent recipient of the prestigious Myers Memorial Medal awarded by the Society for Psychical Research for outstanding contributions.

Here he discussed large-scale psychokinetic phenomena, typically observed during séances in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These phenomena included table rapping, table levitation, human levitation, apports and materializations. Of particular interest is the case of Daniel Dunglas Home, perhaps the greatest spiritualist medium known in history, who produced such phenomena consistently for a period of twenty-five years. Another well-attested case of human levitation is that of the Catholic saint, Joseph of Cupertino. Braude takes issues with those who believe that the reports of such phenomena are untrustworthy.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He serves as dean of transformational psychology at the University of Philosophical Research. He teaches parapsychology for ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living through the Holmes Institute. He has served as vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and is the recipient of its Pathfinder Award for outstanding contributions to the field of human consciousness. He is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities. 

(Recorded on September 6, 2015)