Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping Point

I bought Renée Scheltema's DVD about six months ago from her website. I loved it so much that I formatted it for my iPhone so I could review it at will. Reading Renée's other web interviews, I found what a hardship it was to make this documentary -- financially and just getting the interviewees on tape. I would have loved to be her soundman. I've always wanted to meet every person in her documentary.

The documentary was 10 years in the making and she says that there are six hours more material that could be another documentary.

I was very interested in the Houck spoon bending party. I actually tried to make this happen at a dojo event -- knowing that martial artists have very focused intent. Nobody bent a spoon though. I'm thinking that it might be more successful, if I showed that segment prior to handing out the spoons. Just to allow participants know that it *may* just be possible.

alex, you should try to get an interview with ken wilber.
ken could perfectly outline and explain why it is that some people simply refuse to even have a look at research in this area, and others seem to wanna explain pretty much everything with PSI phenomena etc.
it's simply a matter of where a person stands at the moment with regard to his cognitive, moral, and spiritual development. have a look at his integral theories! i'm sure a lot of people (including me) would very much appreciate an interview with him (it might be difficult to catch him tho).

Ken Wilber is cool... I like... but I try and stay close to the research in Skeptiko... seems like the best way to take some subjectiveness out of the equation.

Nice interview! Very balanced. Movie looks good, have you seen it? A veritable who's who of the scientists, and Paul Verhoeven AssocProd. -- good peoples. I usually don't go to movies but I might make an exception. Good to hear the colleges want to screen it.

Presentiment experiences are very common in martial artists, they train for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dnzKr3buFk

(15 sec clip)

Yes it's natural but you can train it by becoming more in tune with what's natural; civilization tends to pound those instincts out of us but you can train them back up -- in other words make them 'rise to the level of consciousness' more frequently.

Interestingly, although we now live in probably the worst time for religious acceptance of new viewpoints on this in the West, it wasn't always thus and some religions are better than others. Not all of them develop the concept we know as 'heresy' which is what tends to stop the flow of knowledge -- Taoism is a good example, as it never had any orthodoxies, simply multiple sects that happily co-exist. As a result its theories dovetail with Chinese science, to which it contributed, and which knew all sorts of things about geology and magnetism &c. &c. long before we knew them in the west.

And not all religions *do* say there's only one God -- Hinduism always defends other faiths as equally valid. Wish all were like that... but let's not forget that Christianity has contributed to science too -- look up Gregor Mendel. As a religion it wasn't always as blinkered as it (officially) is now, and as far as paranormal phenomena are concerned they have massive experience of it in Catholicism. (Don't forget your former interviewee, Marilynn Hughes, is very Catholic.)

It's just that, as Scheltema is saying, if it isn't happening to a monk or a nun, it's probably the devil doing it as far as they are concerned! :) But I can guarantee they have major experiences in the monasteries -- *major*.

Good reference book on that:

http://www.amazon.com/Future-Body-Explorations-Further-Evolution/dp/0874777305/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267391024&sr=1-1

... in fact Michael Murphy might be worth interviewing. He knows a lot about the research and how philosophy, science and the paranormal interface.

Look forward to the Wiseman/Sheldrake thing!

Excellent interview. I hadn't heard of this movie before but will definitely be checking out.