Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove

Instead of being focused on a predominantly experimental approach, Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, creator and maintainer of the marvelous Youtube channel, New Thinking Allowed, and author of Thinking Allowed: Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, The Roots of Consciousness: The Classic Encyclopedia of Consciousness Studies Revised and Expanded and The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, describes himself as a generalist whose aim is to open up psi phenomena to the populace at large, rather than to pursue a strictly scientific investigation into specific hypotheses.

In this vein, Jeffrey Mishlove says his YouTube Channel “covers the whole field of psi abilities, educating people to the whole range of phenomena that are related to psi and higher states of consciousness,” as he told me. “I haven’t been that much of an experimenter, and someone early in my career even called me an anti-experimentalist, because I always felt that the personal experiences of people would give us more information than scientific experiments.”

Nevertheless, he definitely appreciates the importance of scientific rigor, and we both lamented the lack of seriousness directed towards the topic in mainstream academia. “Most conventional academics who are holding onto their positions and trying to get tenure pretend that there is no such thing as 150 years of research in parapsychology and psi”, he told me.

“I’ve interviewed several philosophers who are idealists, who believe that all of reality is mental at root, and consciousness is the essence of everything we call physical, but even they don’t like to acknowledge the research in parapsychology, and for many it’s just an academic habit, and many feel that their academic positions would be jeopardized if they were advocate research into the area.”

It is for this reason that he advocates the importance of establishing a definitive consensus methodology, which all relevant researchers can agree is optimally likely to yield good results. In this vein, he alluded to Dr. Stephan A. Schwartz, whom I spoke with recently, commending his ARV protocol as a methodological model to be emulated. “Some of the things that he predicted prior to their occurrence have already come to pass, such as people telling him that the Soviet Union would no longer exist, back in the 1970s…something that was regarded as absurd at the time.”

In light of the numerous conversations he has had with philosophers on his channel, I was interested in Dr. Mishlove’s own worldview in light of the reality of psi abilities. Surprisingly, although he told me he leans towards the idealist hypothesis that consciousness, rather than matter, is fundamental, he rejected the idea that idealism, or some other form of panpsychism, necessarily follows as a corollary from the reality of remote viewing. “I think you’ll find some very talented remote viewing researchers who are physicalists…who believe that you can explain all of it sooner or later through physical science,” he told me. I am more inclined to the idealist position of Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, or someone like Philip Goff, author of Galileo’s Error, in which he describes his panpsychist position…I think those positions make more sense, but I don’t think you can rule out materialism as a way of explaining these things.”

(J. Mishlove, personal communication, December 2019).

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