Editorial Overview: New Beginnings and Reassessment
Mark A. Schroll, Ph.D.

We begin this issue by calling attention to our new direction and name Rhine Online: Psi-News Magazine. We also want to announce in this issue our call for contributions and our corresponding Submission Guidelines. Contributors interested in publishing an article in Rhine Online can now contact our Editors by writing to us at Mark@Rhine.org, and Jennifer@Rhine.org. We look forward to hearing from you. Some of you may also be interested in serving as participants in an experiment that Christine Simmons-Moore is conducting at the Rhine Research Center.

To keep you up to date with the latest Rhine Research Center lectures and workshops, Co-Editor Jennifer Moore provides us with a summary overview. This is followed by an overview of recent papers published in the latest issue of Journal of Parapsychology by its Editor, John Palmer. Palmer's overview offers a summary of Diane Dutton and Carl Williams recent research on possible psi in animals, a discussion this issue elaborates on in one of our feature article's “The Unexplained Powers of Animals,” written by Rupert Sheldrake.

Nevertheless we should keep in mind the idea of inter-species communication is a tentative
outgrowth of Sheldrake's work that continues to call out for more experimental verification. Some of the current areas on which he has written about is on how animals (dogs specifically) know when their human caretakers are coming home. Sheldrake’s research on dogs and their human caretakers, as well as how pigeons home, was first explored in his book Seven Experiments That Could Change the World (1994). He elaborates on this discussion and continuing attempts to verify these claims in his article for this issue.
Another fruitful direction I would suggest (that to my knowledge Sheldrake has yet to include) is the work of John Lilly, whose work with dolphins was an attempt to explore inter-species communication. Lilly is also famous for his samadhi tank or sensory deprivation tank experiments (Lilly, 1971), which is one experimental thread that could be useful to psi researchers interested in investigating inter-species communication. Bringing together the work of Sheldrake and Lilly would facilitate this inquiry, as well as a further a synthesis between psi research and transpersonal theories of consciousness.

My own contribution to this issue, “Reflections on Psi and Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Fields,” briefly explores the relationship of Sheldrake's research to the work of Charles T. Tart, and David Bohm's transpersonal physics. Likewise this article encourages more scholars to explore the experimental investigation of Sheldrake's work, as well as applying Sheldrake's ideas to our understanding of consciousness.

Our second feature article in this issue is “A Sociological Perspective on 'Becoming' a Spirit Medium in Britain,” by Hannah Gilbert, founder of the York University, UK group “Exploring the Extraordinary.” Gilbert's inquiry into mediums begins by treating the reality of mediumship as a “social fact,” focusing her investigation on the personality orientations of mediums from an ethnoautobiographical perspective. This focus shifts the emphasis of inquiry to the psychodynamic rites of passage that shaped the developmental process of persons who become spirit mediums. Gilbert's inquiry calls to mind the work of David Lukoff's DSM-IV category of “Religious and Spiritual Problem” as a normal condition of mental health in need of greater understanding, instead of a pathology to be treated and extinguished. Similarly Julie Beischel and Adam Rock (2009) offer a related inquiry into a phenomenological process-focused investigation of mediums, versus the orientation toward proving the physical reality and parapsychological mechanisms that are involved in mediumship research.

George Matthis, President, Paranormal Resource Alliance, examines the new ghost hunting/paranormal reality shows and their subsequent influence on psi research in his article, “A Critical Look at the State of Paranormal Investigation – Setting the Higher Standard.” Finally, Chrisanne Gordon's article offers us her views on “Sports Superstars and Sixth Sense.”

References

Beischel, J. and Rock, A. J. (2009). Addressing the survival versus psi debate through process-focused mediumship research. Journal of Parapsychology, 73, 71-88.

Lilly, J. C. (1971). The center of the cyclone: An autobiography of inner space. New York: Doubleday.

Sheldrake, R. (1994). Seven experiments that could change the world: A do-it-yourself guide to       
revolutionary science. London: Fourth Estate.
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Volume 2, Issue 1, 2010