A fifteen-year-old girl who claimed regular communications with the spirits of her dead friends and relatives was the subject of the very first published work by the now legendary psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. Collected here, alongside many of his later writings on such subjects as life after death, telepathy and ghosts, it was to mark just the start of a professional and personal interest—even obsession—that was to last throughout Jung’s lifetime. Written by one of the greatest and most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century, Psychology and the Occult represents a fascinating trawl through both the dark, unknown world of the occult and the equally murky depths of the human psyche.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Founded the analytical school of psychology and developed a radical new theory of the unconscious that has made him one of the most familiar names in twentieth-century thought.

Table of Contents

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). Founded the analytical school of psychology and developed a radical new theory of the unconscious that has made him one of the most familiar names in 20th Century thought.

The more than fifty articles, essays, and reviews in this volume, collected here for the first time, were published by William James over a span of some twenty-five years. The record of a sustained interest in phenomena of a highly controversial nature, they make it amply clear that James's work in psychical research was not an eccentric hobby but a serious and sympathetic concern. James was broad-minded in his approach but tough-minded in his demand that investigations be conducted in rigorous scientific terms. He hoped his study of psychic phenomena would strengthen the philosophy of an open-ended, pluralistic universe that he was formulating during the same period, and he looked forward to the new horizons for human experience that a successful outcome of his research would create.

Robert A. McDermott, in his Introduction, discusses the relation of these essays to James's other work in philosophy, psychology, and religion.

In this insightful new book on the remarkable William James, the American psychologist and philosopher, Krister Dylan Knapp provides the first deeply historical and acutely analytical account of James's psychical research. While showing that James always maintained a critical stance toward claims of paranormal phenomena like spiritualism, Knapp uses new sources to argue that psychical research held a strikingly central position in James's life. It was crucial to his familial and professional relationships, the fashioning of his unique intellectual disposition, and the shaping of his core doctrines, especially the will-to-believe, empiricism, fideism, and theories of the subliminal consciousness and immortality. Knapp explains how and why James found in psychical research a way to rethink the well-trodden approaches to classic Euro-American religious thought, typified by the oppositional categories of natural vs. supernatural and normal vs. paranormal. He demonstrates how James eschewed these choices and instead developed a tertiary synthesis of them, an approach Knapp terms tertium quid, the third way. Situating James's psychical research in relation to the rise of experimental psychology and Protestantism's changing place in fin de siecle America, Knapp asserts that the third way illustrated a much broader trend in transatlantic thought as it struggled to navigate the uncertainties and religious adventurism of the modern age.

"Parapsychology and Religion" is perhaps the most controversial research area in the psychology of religion. However, in recent decades, psychology of religion has witnessed a growing literature bearing on ontological issues including parapsychological topics such as distant healing and near-death experiences. This book argues that despite the methodological and theoretical controversies that still surround the field of parapsychology, the findings of research on alleged anomalous processes can inform the study of religious/spiritual experiences. Psychological literature on the paranormal is critically reviewed and it is argued that it became less a scientific endeavor and more an ideological program devised to denigrate paranormal believers and experiencers. This volume explores how an open-minded dialogue between parapsychology and psychology of religion might help us move beyond the present ideological disputes and reviewes the complex relations between parapsychology and religion over time as well as their implications for interdisciplinary research on religion and spirituality.

Building on the groundbreaking research of Irreducible Mind and Beyond Physicalism, Edward Kelly and Paul Marshall gather a cohort of leading scholars to address the most recent advances in the psychology of consciousness. Currently emerging as a middle ground between warring fundamentalisms of religion and science, an expanded science-based understanding of nature finally accommodates empirical realities of spiritual sorts while also rejecting rationally untenable overbeliefs. The vision sketched here provides an antidote to the prevailing postmodern disenchantment of the world and demeaning of human possibilities. It not only more accurately and fully reflects our human condition but engenders hope and encourages ego-surpassing forms of human flourishing. It offers reasons for us to believe that freedom is real, that our human choices matter, and that we have barely scratched the surface of our human potentials. It also addresses the urgent need for a greater sense of worldwide community and interdependence - a sustainable ethos - by demonstrating that under the surface we and the world are much more extensively interconnected than previously recognized.

How Therapists Dance follows the numinous thread described by Novalis:

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet. Where they overlap, it is in every point of the overlap.

As in the first poem, in which snails scrawl the names of Buddhas with their silvery trails and ends with the poet kissing his wife's hands, taking out the garbage, and being confronted with an overwhelming moon. These poems stitch together psychiatric ward encounters with the musings of security guards in an art gallery; an urban dance floor provoking a breakthrough for a stranded therapist; his father's empty shotgun shells, his aunt's accordion finding its way inside the body, ribs expanding and contracting as though you are an instrument life is still learning how to play. --

How Therapists Dance is the meeting ground for the spiritual seeker, the therapist and the observant poet who negotiates this tricky terrain and writes poems for them all. There is humor and longing, tenderness and beauty. Each of these voices has its say. From them I learn how enlightenment is spoiled by wanting it too much. How the dance of therapists is into and out of the skin of others. How Superman's true heroism is revealed. These are poems worthy of a long-term friendship.
--Len Anderson, author of Invented by the Night --

Dane Cervine explores with a keen poet's eye the borderlands where the doctor meets the mystic, the adult meets the child he once was, the beauty and pain of life become indistinguishable. Deliciously full of joy, insight, and awe, Cervine's poetry certainly shows you how therapists dance.
-- Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line --

Dane Cervine often lets a wry humor open the door to a deeper place. His light stroke sets the reader at ease, invites us into "the mischief in the young boy's fiddle," the "almost tangible, humming in the air between us" where, even through sadness and hardship "a blue dragonfly whirs" and we come to know we are "wide enough, finally, for every jagged thing." His finely-wrought poems are a comfort and a compass.
--Patrice Vecchione, author of Writing and the Spiritual Life and a poetry collection, The Knot Untied --

While Dane Cervine's first book, The Jeweled Net of Indra, was woven with themes related to social justice and our larger connection with each other, this new book is flavored with the act of "attention" shared by the triune influences of his work: therapy, meditation, and poetry. Dane Cervine's poems are at once disciplined, sturdy, compassionate and wise. And there's an inspired playfulness, as in these lines from his poem "Enlightenment Is a Bitch"

...even fire hydrants with their red stubby arms become mandalas, and worse, the police siren revving its wail behind/my slow-moving car sounds like a mantra...

--Robert Sward, author of New & Selected Poems, 1957-2012 --

Regarding the poem "Accordions & Shotguns," a finalist for the Wabash:
The sheer volume of information in this poem is impressive--which is to say that all that story is fluently delivered to the reader--but it is really the passion and precision of the final stanza that earns my full attention.
---Tony Hoagland

As the rain comes pouring down on Buck Creek, a man slowly goes out of his mind and does something so terrible that the house will never forget it. A lightning storm brings a sight that shocks a family in Hargett. A woman is paralyzed in fear in her own bed near the Madison County line. A headless man offers a gift to a poor widow that changes her life. Ghosts from the Civil War haunt a popular soccer field. A little boy just wants to play with those who visit him in Pryse...but he's been dead for almost a century...

As a follow up to Haunted Estill County, More Tales from Haunted Estill County explores stories of ghosts, demons, witches, vampires, and even Estill County's own version of Jesse James.

Collected through interviews with local residents all across Estill County, the stories might just make you wonder if the monster under the bed is real.

From restless spirits that roam through houses they once inhabited to unimaginable terrors that stalk the woods after dark, will it ever be safe to turn the light off again?

BEING Your Self Seeing and Knowing What's IN the Way IS the Way It's not easy to BE your self in a world where almost everyone wants you to be someone else Even friends and colleagues often want you to be their version of you We are surrounded and ambushed every day by a thousand images and voices calling us to invest our identity in their product, their brand, their label, their service. It's not surprising we all go through our own personal form of 'identity crisis'. Sometimes it lasts a lifetime Who you think you are, is usually who you are not Until you truly know your self you cannot be at peace, you will not be able to love and happiness will be elusive. Mike explores and explains: How you can rediscover the 'real you' How to SEE your self as you really are? How to KNOW you are being your 'authentic self'? Mike George is an author of ten books in 15 languages on how to awaken your awareness of your true self and thereby restore the essence of your being, which is love. He talks inspirationally, teaches deeply and tutors mindfully across the world on topics such as self-awareness, spiritual intelligence, liberating leadership and 'continuous unlearning'. His other recent books include The 7 AHA s of Highly Enlightened SOULS, The 7 Myths About LOVE...Actually Don't Get MAD Get Wise and The Immune System of the SOUL.

2013 Reprint of 1937 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The first chapter of this essay provides a soundly skeptical, mythicist take on Christian origins, while simultaneously asserting Lemurian and Atlantean sources for esoteric traditions. The next three chapters are organized according to the book's pattern: brain/spirit, heart/emotions, and generative organs/physical sensation. In the chapter on "The Spinal Column" corresponding to the heart, there is also a discussion of clairvoyance and mediumship, and in the chapter on "The Infernal Worlds" Hall additionally provides an exposition of color symbolism. The final chapter of Occult Anatomy is on "embryology," which offers readings of religious texts as perinatal allegories. It then continues with a thumbnail description of the seven-year cyclical climacteric pattern of individual human development.