The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People [NOOK Book]

Enlightening

ESP is often passed off as delusion or coincidence. But decades of research by Drs. J.B. and Louis Rhine at Duke University provided ample evidence that it is a sixth sense, of sorts, more available to some than others. Author Sally Rhine Feather is the daughter of the Rhines and is director of the Rhine Research Center in Durham, NC. Michael Schmicker, an investigative journalist, is the author of Best Evidence, a book which explores evidence for psychic phenomena and survival of consciousness at death. The two have collaborated on this book in offering dozens of stories from the Rhine Research Center¿s database. ¿Our efforts today no longer focus on whether ESP exists; we have strong evidence that it does,¿ Feather states in the preface. ¿Instead, we are studying how ESP works, by examining how personality, emotional relationship, mental and physical states, education, gender, and other variables may affect ESP experiences.¿ The authors are quick to point out that the many cases in this book, taken from more 14,000 in the database, are not intended as scientific proof of ESP. While anecdotal, the great number of them must lead any open-minded person to consider that the explanation for them goes beyond fraud, delusion, or coincidence. Consider the case of a bank president who, during World War II, became very depressed while on a fishing trip, feeling strongly that his son, Bill, was the cause of it. A few nights later a telegram was received saying Bill had been critically wounded. The distraught father had no indication as to what the wounds were, but he began to visualize a head wound, right behind the ear, as well as some kind of arm wound. As it turned out, the actual injuries were almost exactly as seen by the father. Many cases are of precognition ¿ seeing events before they actually happen ¿ such as the case of a woman driving toward the Pentagon with her husband and suddenly seeing huge clouds of smoke rising into the sky over the building. She became very emotional and began hyperventilating. Two weeks later, on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. Children have many ESP experiences that are often ignored by adults, who assume that they are the result of overactive imaginations. That apparently wasn¿t the case with a four-year-old child asked his parents if Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Charles were in a train wreck. ¿I see¿d they did,¿ the child told the confused parents. The next day, word reached the parents that the aunt and uncle had stalled on train tracks and their car was hit by a train. As far as could be determined, it happened almost the same time as the child¿s remarks. A very interesting chapter deals with messages from the dead, such as deceased loved ones appearing to children before word had reached the family of the death of the person. In one case, a woman and her teenaged daughter traveled from Washington, D.C. to California and were greeted by the woman¿s father, whom they had left in Washington, D.C. As the father/grandfather greeted them, he slowly faded away. Soon thereafter, they received word that he had died. The final chapter gives advice on recognizing and dealing with personally experienced ESP, the goal being to help the person accept, understand, and embrace the experience rather than fear it or pass it off as a trick of the mind. This book is interesting, informative, intriguing, and inspiring. With 100 or so cases detailed, it offers plenty of variety and can be read in bits and pieces. Many of the experiences are simple enough to be shared with children as stories to enlighten rather than to frighten.

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An Exhilarating Overview of Decades of ESP Research

THE GIFT is an outstanding compendium of decades of essential research into ESP that is destined to be a classic reference book for years to come. Author Dr. Sally Rhine Feather shares the findings of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory and the Rhine Research Center since the early 1930s in a friendly manner that invites readers to take a look at some of the startling intuitive insights of hundreds of ordinary individuals. THE GIFT devotes an entire chapter to sharing stories of ESP between mothers and their children, another to the ESP of children, another to ESP in romance, another for messages from the dead, and several to ESP related to premonitions of various disasters. THE GIFT is filled with fascinating findings, such as the conclusion that we tend to have ESP experiences most often with people who share close personal emotional ties -- such as parents, children, siblings, spouses and friends. 57% of people who shared stories of such experiences noted that they received intuitive insights such as precognitive flashes of something about to happen in the form of dreams, while 30% noted sudden intuitive impressions while they were awake, and 13% experienced visions so real that they seemed to actually be happening. I was intrigued to learn that 30% of all psychic messages from loved ones involve death, 40% involve news of accidents... so that a full 70% of ESP messages about others are tuned in to potential negative disruptions in the lives of those we care about. The authors assert, 'When any two members of a family are emotionally close, the death of one can generate psychic shock wave capable of immediately reaching the other.' Potentially lethal situations also seem capable of reaching loved ones very quickly. It's interesting to note that the majority of ESP messages people receive about themselves involve precognitive warnings of accidents and injuries as well. THE GIFT raises the excellent question, 'Is fate inevitable?' There are those who argue that if you can make a successful intervention and change the future, then by definition, no precognition took place. Others assert that we see possible and probable futures, so it is possible to see one future and actually experience something else. There is no scientific test yet developed to determine whether a future envisioned and then averted is one that might have ever come to be real... yet people receiving strong impressions of danger appear to be able to change the future. People made changes to avert disaster in 162 of 433 cases reported to the Rhine Research Center over the past sixty years. Since ESP comes to us in the same form and manner as our ordinary mental processes, it can be difficult to distinguish between meaningful messages and 'noise.' Nevertheless, of the 162 individuals who sensed potential danger, nearly two thirds of them succeeded by recognizing the significance of their psychic impressions and acting quickly and effectively, even when some aspects of their vision were not entirely accurate and people around them did not fully cooperate. THE GIFT is a book that will give you an exhilarating sense of how it feels to receive ESP impressions, and a sense of the breadth and depth of the ESP experience.