Miscellaneous

This is a beginning of new year and this year Mind-Energy.net will turn 5 years old. Wow, it's been an interesting ride.

I now have the ability to do some more for Mind-Energy then previously and I would like to know what you, my readers, would like me to focus more on. Is it on the scientific parapsychology stuff, is it the interviews, book or product reviews, articles about energy healing, some health "hacks" for different situations, like the nose congestion massage or 1-minute energy exercises?

Maybe you'd like something that I didn't even consider.

Please take a minute to think and write in the comments to this article about your wishes from Mind-Energy.

Thanks, Jacob.

I’m a bit of a fan of Steve Pavlina who runs one of the best websites on personal development. In addition, his wife, Erin is a psychic medium and has a site of her own, where she tells her own interesting stories and insights on life. Steve is also interested and practicing some of the psychic stuff, but he’s not as experienced and as natural as she is.

Anyway, Steve also has a podcast where he mostly talks about his topics but from time to time he’ll shift to the more esoteric topics. His latest podcast episode is called “Being Psychic” and it’s 1 and half hours of conversation between him and Erin about her experiences. It is a very interesting episode and it gives some insight into her life and her view of the esoteric part of life.

I’ve already been somewhat familiar with parts of the content, since I follow their sites, but for anyone not familiar with them I’m sure it will be even more interesting. Some of the topics covered in this podcast are:

• Story of how Erin developed her psychic skills from a young age
• Lucid dreaming
• Astral projection
• How Erin made the shift to doing professional psychic readings
• Erin’s Criss Angel story
• Lessons from 1000+ professional readings
• Skeptics, skepticism, disbelief, and reading for skeptics vs. believers
• Psychic junkies
• The role of free will
• Spirit guides, angels, and humans who’ve crossed over
• What happens when you die? What is it like on the other side?
• Distinguishing genuine psychic impressions from emotions and imagination
• Why charge money for readings? Why not do them for free?
• How to price your readings when you read professionally
• What happens during a psychic reading? How does it work?
• Why do different people get such different readings?
• Chakras
• Do psychics predict the future?
• Difference between a psychic and a medium
• How to develop your own psychic/intuitive skills
• How personal development continues after you die

You can read more about the episode and listen to it from Being psychic podcast.

This year has been a successful one for mind-energy.net. I have established numerous connection with people from the parapsychology (or psi, if you prefer) sphere, including Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko podcast, medium Marcel Cairo and several other people. I’ve also opened the parapsychology and healing forum in addition to the blog on this website. The forum includes a very active Offical Skeptiko podcast forum with more than 2400 posts as of now.

The website has seen large increase in visitors. The main site itself (without the forum) was visited more than 300,000 times this year. The most popular pages were:

• This year’s hit: Spoon bending instructions and pictures with more than 100,000 page views since Feb 23 2007 . Overall, the three articles about spoon bending: Spoon bending instructions, Spoon bending video and How to bend a spoon using your mind got over 150000 page views this year. Quite a popular topic, it seems.
• Last year’s hit, my grandma’s instructions to get rid of stuffy or runny nose received about 95000 views in 2007. I’ve received lots of “thank you’s” for this one, although not everyone benefit from it. There are many other suggestions in the comments to this page (227 comments).
• The hit from exactly two years ago about Increasing energy levels in 1 minute got over 18000 page views.

I’ve also done 6 interviews this year (up from 4 in 2006) which I find very rewarding:

• Interview with Bonnie Adam – Reiki master and psychic reader
• Interview with psychic reader DeAna
• Interview with Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko podcast and Open Source Science project
• Interview with Erin Pavlina, a psychic medium
• Interview with medium Marcel Cairo
• Interview with Laura Bruno

Overall, 2007 saw 115 posts (see archives for all of them), which is not bad output for this niche and with the little time I have. I still have grand ideas for future posts and for the future development of the site which I need to find a way and the time to implement. I’d appreciate any help you can provide.

In the first months of 2007 I’ve also developed and ran the Psi Experiments websites which was a very educational experience for me, even if it didn’t reach its goals. It took me a month to develop and build, get sponsors for the prizes and promote using press releases and other websites. I’ve ran 3 Psi experiment:

1. Where’s the ring (results)
2. Remote Viewing/Dowsing experiment (results)
3. Guess the card (ongoing)

Unfortunately, because of bad design none of them could validate the existence of psi. I would still like to develop more and better psi experiments but I need help in their development, mostly from the experiment design point of view.

My wishes for 2008 is to see the readership of the site grow and a more active community to start to build up in the forums. I would like to interview more interesting people, to see more interest in psi in the scientific world and for all of us to be healthy and happy in the forthcoming year.

Happy new year to everyone.

Jacob.

Our Parapsychology forums member, WhiteTiger, will give free Tarot readings for forum member in the thread Free tarot readings in the forums.

Tiger is a retired engineer/machinist/inventor, in his mid fifties, passed the Mensa qualification test back when it took a minimum 150 to get in before they lowered the standards. He ended up years back on a quasi-shamanic path as a result of looking for answers to the weirdness that have always been present in his life.

Here’s the offer in Tiger’s words:

I answer direct, specific questions on most subjects. I prefer to have the question only, with absolutely no backstory or qualifications to it that could be “read into” for a mentalist cold reading. “Life readings” and the tired old “does my bf/gf really love me” questions are so open to simple psychological manipulations that they are useless for demonstration purposes. Same goes for the sneering skeptic questions about change in the pocket or color of my car… that isn’t tarot, that would be RV.

Ask your questions in the Tarot readings thread. Free registration to the forums is required in order to post.

On the same occasion I would ask you to check out our forums once again, we’ve got a little nice community of interesting people there. If you like philosophical and scientific discussions of psi phenomena and research, join the discussions in the Skeptiko forum. We also have sections on psi ability development, health and alternative medicine.

I’m going to host the second volume of Qigong and Healing arts Forum. Qigong and Energy Arts Forum is a monthly online magazine, featuring the Internet’s best new articles on qigong, kundalini yoga, reiki, and other energy arts. It was started and is managed by http://www.martialdevelopment.com.

One of my articles, Qigong Yiquan Review was published in the first volume. You can see it at http://www.martialdevelopment.com/blog/qigong-and-energy-arts-forum-1/.

The second volume will be out on December 21 and it is now possible to submit your articles. If you have an article about Qigong or other healing arts, please send your articles for submission at http://www.martialdevelopment.com/blog/about/#contact.

Start pressing those keys already.

I wrote in October about my short phone encounter with Dr. Alexander Imich, 104 years old parapsychologist living in NYC. Today I’ve read an article about his current life situation in the New York times online. The article, titled Still Pursuing a Lifetime’s Worth of Interests at 104 is under the neediest cases section of the paper.

As it becomes clear from the article Dr. Imich lost all of his money on the stock market during the last 5 years and he’s still in debt, giving all his social security payments to the collectors. The article in NY Times tells little about his parapsycholgy interests, mentioning that he still reads several hours a day and gives lectures on this subject. Instead, the article focuses on the financial aid that Dr. Imich gets from some local NY funds, like the NY TImes Neediest Cases fund. He also doesn’t have any close relatives as most of them were killed in Poland during World War II. Dr. Imich is of Jewish origins in Poland where most of the jews were killed during the Holocaust.

It’s very sad to see this man in such a need.
The article also includes photographs of Dr. Imich.

Daniel Tammet

The story of Daniel Tammet is a rare story. And although it is not about psychic abilities, it is still a story of extreme, paranormal mental ability. Daniel Tammet is what is called a Savant. A savant, while literally means a learned person, and comes into English from the French, usually means a “polymath”, or a person of exceptional genius, like Leonardo da Vinci. But there’s also the kind of people who are called Autisic savants, and these people are more special. Daniel Tammet is one of them and he’s more valuable to the scientific world that most of them, for reasons to be disclosed below.

Autistic Savants are usually people who have really extraordinary mental abilities in some areas but are usually so at the expense of social skills and they are all autistic by definition, which makes contact with them harder. One of the more famous living savants is Kim Peek, who was the inspiration for Dustin Huffman’s role in the movie “The Rainman”. Daniel (born 1979), on the hands, is almost normal and can express himself very well, including how his mind seems to work. Daniel has the following extraordinary abilities:

Hello everyone. I’m glad to announce that I’ve rolled out a new design for the Mind-Energy.net site. The design was done by a professional web designer and I believe it provides better readability, clearer structure to the site and also a fresh look. I am looking for your feedback on the design, since I might have overlooked things or simply you can see things differently than I do (and probably see better as well).

If you have further suggestions, please use the comments to this entry or write in the forum section Mind-Energy.net site discussions, I’ve started a new thread there on the design.

I’ve written about Marcel Cairo only 2 days ago about his intuitive to inquirer (i2i) Challenge. Marcel is a psychic medium and a host of a podcast on similar topic, called AfterlifeFM – Small talk. Live readings.. Upcoming show, today, Aug 21, is In search of the evidence – Science, Skeptics & Me. You can listen to it live or download at a later time. Among his previous guests were Annalisa Ventola of Public parapsychology and Alex Tsakiris of Skeptiko podcast.

Today I’m glad to announce that Parapsychology and alternative medicine forums of Mind-energy.net will be hosting the Official AfterlifeFM forum, where you and other listeners will be able to discuss the show, the guests and the host, thus joining already live and active Skeptiko’s official forum, also hosted there.

Since many of you still don’t go to the Healing and Parapsychology forums on this site, I’ve though I’d introduce some of the latest questions on the the forums and ask for you participation.

A woman asked in post Pain in palms the following:

When i think of losing one I love…I get this drawing electrical pain in my palms..and a few fingers. Has anyone experienced this and what is it?

AtxRyan asks about meditating in the morning and feeling hungry :

I’ve found that the general consensus for most types of meditation is to not do it while your body is trying to digest food. Before breakfast and at night before bed are common recommendations, as you probably know. Right when I wake up every morning I’m very hungry and i must eat. This causes a problem, obviously. Of course I could meditate later, but a morning meditation seems very important to me and is something I want to be able to do. Any recommendations? Has anyone else had to deal with this?

If you can provide some help to these people or have some questions you’d like to ask yourself, please do. We have a forum called Specific conditions help where you can ask for help on some issues you’re having.

In another forum, Home remedies, I want you to share your “grandma recipes” for various conditions. I’ve started a thread on common cold since it’s something very common and I guess every home has their own remedies for that. Please share yours with the rest of us.

There’s been an interesting discussion, titled Source of the energy, started as a question on life for energy and continued as debate between pacificwhim, a journalist doing research on energy healing methods, SkepticalBry (Bryan the skeptic), and other members.

I would also like to know your opinion on homeopathic drugs.

Please join the forums and be part of the community.

The cat named Oscar, in Providence, R.I., nursing home, seems to be able to predict the deaths of its residents. When he senses their time is near, Oscar goes to the room, jumps onto the bed, curls up next to the patient, and purrs. The cat has now been correct over 25 times and it has come to this that the nursing home’s staff calls the family members of the patients whom the cat “marked”.

The cat, now 2 years old, has been living in the nursing home since it was a kitten. It comes to dying patients usually 2 hours before they die, sometimes half a day earlier. The staff doesn’t know how it happens that the cat “knows” but most people think that the body of a dying person produces certain odors and that the cat can smell them. There are some other possibilities as well, but nothing is concrete.

There are many sources for this story, you can read one of them at cbsnews

What do you think about this story? Discuss in the forums

NBC has announced that Uri Geller and Chriss Angel (Mindfreak) will be appearing in a new TV reality show called “Phenomenon” (working title) this fall.

The show’s format was bought from Israeli Keshet Broadcasting. The original show in Israel’s channel 2 was called “The Successor” and it was a great hit in Israel’s prime time. The format is somewhat similar to the popular American Idol format where contestants (mentalists – stage magicians specializing in mind tricks) perform acts of seemingly paranormal ability, like telepathy etc. One contestants leaves the show each week, selected by Geller.

Geller and Angel will assist the Phenomenon contestants with their insight. The ultimate winner from the 10 participants will be selected by home viewers.

Phenomenon is a co-production of Granada America, Keshet Broadcasting, and Kuperman Productions in association with SevenOne International, which controls the worldwide rights to the show’s format.