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Excerpt from Researches Into the Phenomena of Modern Spiritualism Of all the eminent scientists who have pains takingly investigated the mysterious phenomena of Modem Spiritualism - and there are many - Sir William Crookes must be easily recognized as leader. His eminence as a discoverer and an inventor and his vast services to the world as a chemist have given to his "Researches into the Phenomena of Modem Spiritualism" a value and potency that could not attach to labors of men equally honest and painstaking, but devoid of his scientific attainments and great reputation. Beginning his investigations of Spiritual Phenomena over a third of a century ago, when the prejudice against psychic research was much stronger than today, and pursuing his researches with all the care, caution, and accuracy that marked his other scientific work; he rendered his studies in this new field doubly valuable to the world by his conscientious record of all the details and conditions and his noble boldness in publishing the same to the world. The record of his experiments with Daniel Douglas Home and Miss Florence Cook as psychics, all conducted under test conditions, must ever stand among the most marvelous of human experiences and an impregnable defence of the spirituality of man's nature and of his ability to survive the shock of death. The articles, here quoted, first appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science, of which Sir William was the able editor; and they have been supplemented by extracts from the speech of the eminent scientist delivered from the chair of the British Association, at its Bristol meeting, in 1898, in which speech he declared over again his convictions concerning the value of the results of scientific investigation into what has been known as the realm of the occult. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

• Shares data and meta-analysis from a large volume of extremely sophisticated experiments that provide proof for the existence of psi phenomena • Explores evidence of past lives, intuitive knowing, and other spiritual phenomena • Reveals the author’s own inexplicable experiences as well as her conversations with scientific colleagues, high-level experts, and government officials Fully indoctrinated into the cult of science, neuroscientist Mona Sobhani, Ph.D., aggressively defended the dogma of scientific beliefs--until a series of life-altering events caused her to reconsider spirituality and psi concepts and launched her into a two-year investigation into the ineffable mysteries of our world. Sharing the extensive research she discovered on past lives, karma, and the complex interactions of mind and matter, the author details her transformation from diehard materialist to open-minded spiritual seeker. She reveals her conversations about spirituality and anomalous occurrences with scientific colleagues as well as high-level experts and government officials who shared data on extremely sophisticated experiments that provided proof for the existence of psi phenomena. She discovered that psi research has been conducted on a grand scale for more than a century--by hundreds of scientists with hundreds of thousands of participants--and that there exists substantial evidence for the reality of psi. She examines meta-analysis of these experiments, such as that of the Ganzfield tests, which showed odds against chance of 12 billion to 1--throwing our current scientific materialist paradigm into question. Providing a deep dive into the literature of psychology, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy, and esoteric texts, Sobhani also explores the relationship between psi phenomena, the transcendence of space and time, and spirituality. Culminating with the author’s serious reckoning with one of the foundational principles of neuroscience--scientific materialism--this illuminating book shows that the mysteries of human experience go far beyond what the present scientific paradigm can comprehend.