Psi Tech is a for-profit corporation started in 1989 by government-trained remote viewers to provide services to science and industry (particularly Fortune 500 companies). The Chairman was Major General Albert N. Stubblebine III, former head of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, and while in the army he had been a strong supporter of

Another useful, and superbly documented, book is The Future of the Body (1992) by Michael Murphy.

Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts University School of Medicine presented an innovative approach in his book Boundaries in the Mind (1991). Hartmann’s thinking about boundaries has some remarkable parallels with Jean Shinoda Bolen’s interpretation of the Greek trickster, Hermes.

Many trickster qualities can be understood in terms of boundaries, structures, and transitions. Tricksters are boundary crossers; they destabilize structures; they govern transitions. They also embody paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

Victor Turner studied the role of ritual in indigenous societies, particularly rites of passage. Those rites signaled periods of transition, as between childhood and adulthood. They were dangerous periods during which previous statuses and relationships were suspended. The “structure” of society was eliminated temporarily, and those periods are

Spiritualism has several trickster elements, its frequent association with deception being only one. Mediums, per their name, mediate between this world and the next, and it is no accident that trickster gods also often serve in that capacity.

Many may wonder what the trickster has to do with any of this. After all, in our society, the trickster figure is simply an odd literary device, a vehicle for amusing and silly stories. It seems preposterous to use him to explain abstruse scientific facts. But in many less-rationalized societies, trickster tales are not merely literary creations;

John Wilkins’ Mercury: Or the Secret and Swift Messenger, one of the first books discussing mentalist methods, spoke favorably of communications from spirits and angels.

Academe does not totally neglect the paranormal. Sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and folklorists are allowed to study beliefs about paranormal events, but there is a taboo against attempting to verify their reality. In academe today, serious consideration of the supernatural is almost exclusively limited to the arts and humanities. Yet