Reflections: My Favorite Guests
By Art Ray
If you listen to A.R.E.'s online radio program Reflections: The Wisdom of Edgar Cayce, you know that the show has covered some fascinating topics, such as near-death experiences, mediumship, psychic abilities, dowsing, and the history of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.). As the show's host, I've had the opportunity to interview many informed and entertaining guests such as Josie Varga, Dean Radin, Edwin May, James Mullaney, Sidney Kirkpatrick, Micki Kluge, and June Bro. In addition, we've gone to the archives to hear presentations from the vault including the sons of Edgar Cayce— Hugh Lynn Cayce and Edgar Evans Cayce. Some of my favorite guests, though, present information on the paranormal from a scientific viewpoint.
It's amazing how little time a 40-minute interview provides when I'm interviewing a guest. There is so much information we try to condense into one show. It's especially difficult to cover all the research of Josie Varga, who has compiled numerous accounts of near-death experiences and after-death communication and presents a positive message when it comes to life's difficulties. She has been on the show several times, but I continue to have more questions I would like for her to answer. What I feel is most compelling about Josie's research is how she analyzes the data and looks for commonalities in the near-death events. You can listen to podcasts of our past show guests, such as Josie. Her first interview contains an interesting account of her personal experience with after-death communication regarding an individual who died on 9/11/2001.
Another guest who has compiled an impressive volume of compelling data is Julie Beischel, PhD, who is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Institute . Using her education in various scientific disciplines, she approaches mediumship through rigorous triple-blind studies and spends a considerable amount of time planning studies and collecting data. This is the type of work that needs to be done more in the field of parapsychology. In her interview, she urges listeners who wish to study parapsychological phenomena to first study a mainstream scientific field, and then apply those empirical principles to parapsychology.
Another researcher of parapsychology with a scientific background is Edwin May, Ph.D., a former nuclear physicist who is currently the Executive Director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory. What I find interesting about Dr. May is that he has approached his studies from a skeptical viewpoint and seeks to remove as much coincidence and potential error from his experiments as possible. I was so interested in his projects that I interviewed him longer than usual and made an extended version of the show for the podcast page. In the latter half of the interview, you can hear him explain an interesting experiment regarding precognition, which focuses on the physiological response to bursts of white noise and reveals the possibility that we can anticipate events at least a few seconds prior to their occurring.
One researcher you may want to hear is Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist at the Institute for Noetic Sciences. He has collected a huge amount of data on psychic phenomena with fascinating results. He also has developed a data analysis method which takes commonalities from prior studies, done by different researchers, on the same subject in order to compile the data and get a bigger statistical pool of information to reduce the percentage error and illuminate the results even further.
If you are interested in astronomy and strange phenomena involving celestial bodies, you should listen to the episode featuring James Mullaney, FRAS. He is an astronomer and speaker who is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. You may have seen one of his amazing presentations at an A.R.E. conference in Virginia Beach. His programs feature beautiful and sometimes unexplained images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. I thought his debunking of the "galactic alignment" of 2012 was interesting, along with the information on the Venus transit, a genuine and rare phenomenon.
Of course, there is also Carlos Alvarado, PhD, who is the Scholar in Residence at Atlantic University here in Virginia Beach. He studies out-of-body experiences and has written about the history of parapsychological research. For those of you who are students at Atlantic University, you should really check out his work. I know he sometimes needs volunteers.
These are just some of the guests who have come on the show and presented their research from a scientific viewpoint. You can browse through past shows by going tocontent.edgarcayce.org/radio and clicking on "podcasts," which are actually just mp3 files. You don't need a special player to listen to them.
I could write at length about our other guests, such as those who delve into the history of the A.R.E. and Edgar Cayce, but that will have to wait until later. Until then, make sure to listen to the show Sunday mornings from 9 a.m. until 11 a.m. EST, and download past show podcasts at edgarcayce.org/radio.
Show Host: Art Ray In addition to hosting the show Reflections: The Wisdom of Edgar Cayce, Art has recorded several A.R.E. Press audio books including Edgar Cayce on Vibrations: Spirit in Motion audio book and 2012: Mayan Year of Destiny audio book, as well as special promotions for A.R.E. including downloadable files in the member-only section of EdgarCayce.org. To contact Art or submit a question, visit EdgarCayce.org/radio and click on the Submit a Question link.
