Arthur Koestler

 

 

Though Arthur Koestler was an author, and journalist he also, had some serious interest in parapsychology. Hence, his inclusion here. Incidently, I, once, met by chance the woman who acted as his carer before the suicide of himself, and his wife.

 

RS.

 

 

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The native form of this personal name is Kösztler Artúr. This article uses the Western name order.

Arthur Koestler
Koestler in 1948
Born	Kösztler Artúr 5 September 1905 Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died	1 March 1983 (aged 77) London, England
Occupation	Novelist, essayist, journalist
Nationality	Hungarian, British
Ethnicity	Jewish
Citizenship	Naturalized British subject
Period	1934–1983
Subjects	Fiction, non-fiction, history, autobiography, politics, philosophy, psychology, parapsychology, science
Notable work(s)	Darkness at Noon The Thirteenth Tribe
Notable award(s)	Sonning Prize (1968) CBE (1972)
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Ascher (1935–50) Mamaine Paget (1950–52) Cynthia Jefferies[1] (1965–83)
Influences[show] Gilbert Ryle

Arthur Koestler, CBE (5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany until, disillusioned by Stalinism, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame. Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the Sonning Prize "for outstanding contribution to European culture" and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia.^[2] In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.

Contents [hide] 1 Life 1.1 Origins and early life 1.2 1926–1931 Palestine, Paris, Berlin and Polar flight 1.3 The 1930s 1.4 The war years, 1940–45 1.5 The post-war years 1.5.1 1945–55 1.5.2 1956–75 1.5.3 Final years, 1976–83 2 Death and its controversies 2.1 Controversial personal life 3 Influence and legacy 3.1 Politics and causes 3.2 Evolution 3.3 Paranormal 3.4 Hallucinogens 3.5 Judaism 4 Languages 5 Published works 5.1 Fiction (novels) 5.2 Drama 5.3 Autobiography 5.4 Other non-fiction 5.5 Writings as a contributor 6 Biographies of Koestler 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Life[edit]

"[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud's. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Traveling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist sympathizer, he ran into Langston Hughes. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia, before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the infamous Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists of the era: Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but didn't die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy, and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940, Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s, he helped found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Mel Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s, he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s, he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie."

Anne Applebaum, reviewing Michael Scammell: Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic^[3]

Origins and early life[edit]

Koestler was born in Budapest to Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). He was an only child. His father Henrik Koestler, of Jewish and Hungarian descent, was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. According to Koestler's authorized biography, Henrik's father, Leopold Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army who Magyarised his name to "Lipot".^[4] In 1861 he married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He then set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.^[5]
Arthur's mother, Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles) was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors were Mishel Loeb, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Judah became a well-known poet. Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Her father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where Adele grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, her father abandoned his wife and daughter and emigrated to the United States. Adele and her mother moved from Vienna to Budapest to stay with Adele's married sister.
Henrik Koestler met Adele in 1898, married her in 1900, and on 5 September 1905, Arthur, their only child, was born. The Koestlers lived in spacious, well-furnished, rented apartments in various predominantly Jewish districts of Budapest. During Arthur's early years they employed a cook/housekeeper as well as a foreign governess. His primary school education started at an experimental private kindergarten founded by Laura Striker (née Polanyi). Her daughter Eva Striker later became Koestler's lover, and they remained friends all his life.
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 deprived his father of foreign suppliers, and his business collapsed. Facing destitution, the family moved temporarily to a boarding house in Vienna. When the war ended, the family returned to Budapest. Arthur witnessed the short-lived Hungarian Bolshevik Revolution of 1919, the temporary occupation of Budapest by the Romanian Army, and the White Terror under the right-wing regime of Admiral Horthy. In 1920 the family returned to Vienna, where Henrik set up a successful new import business.
In September 1922, Arthur enrolled at the Vienna Polytechnic University to study engineering, joining a Zionist duelling student fraternity.^[6] When Henrich's business failed, Koestler stopped attending lectures, and was expelled for non-payment of the fees. In March 1926 Koestler wrote a letter to his parents telling them that he was going to Palestine for a year to work as an assistant engineer in a factory, for the purpose of gaining experience which would help him find a job in Austria. On 1 April 1926, he left Vienna for Palestine.^[7]

1926–1931 Palestine, Paris, Berlin and Polar flight[edit]

After arriving, for a few weeks Koestler lived in a kibbutz, an agricultural collective. His application to join the collective (Kvutzat Heftziba) was rejected by its members.^[8] For the next twelve months, he supported himself by menial jobs in the cities of Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he often depended on friends and acquaintances for survival.^[9] He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German. In the spring of 1927, he left Palestine briefly, to run the Secretariat of Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party in Berlin.
Later that same year, through a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where for the next two years, he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers^[10] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist.
On June 1929, while on leave in Berlin, Koestler successfully lobbied at Ullstein for a transfer away from Palestine.^[11] In September he was sent to Paris to fill a vacancy in the bureau of the Ullstein News Service. A year later, in 1931, he was called to Berlin and appointed science editor of Vossische Zeitung and science adviser to the Ullstein newspaper empire.^[12] The same year he was Ullstein's choice to represent the paper on board the Graf Zeppelin airship's Polar flight, which carried a team of scientists and the Polar aviator Lincoln Ellsworth to 82 degrees North (thus not to the North Pole) and back. Koestler was the only journalist on board: his live wireless broadcasts and subsequent articles and lecture tours throughout Europe brought him further kudos. Soon after, he was appointed foreign editor and assistant editor-in-chief of the mass-circulation Berliner Zeitung am Mittag.^[13][14] In 1931 Koestler, encouraged by Eva Striker, and impressed by what he believed to be the achievements of the Soviet Union, became a supporter of Marxism-Leninism; and on 31 December 1931, he applied for membership in the Communist Party of Germany.^[15]

The 1930s[edit]

Koestler wrote a book on the Soviet Five-Year Plan, but it did not meet with the approval of the Soviet authorities and was never published. In 1932 he traveled in Turkmenistan and Central Asia, reviewing conditions. In September 1933 he returned to Paris and for the next two years was active in anti-Fascist movements; he wrote propaganda under the direction of Willy Muenzenberg, the Comintern's chief propaganda director in the West.
In 1935 he married Dorothy Ascher, a fellow Communist activist (they separated amicably in 1937).^[16] In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War he undertook a visit to General Francisco Franco's headquarters in Seville on behalf of the Comintern using the London daily News Chronicle as cover.^[17] He had to escape when recognised and denounced as a Communist by a former German colleague. Back in France he wrote L'Espagne Ensanglantée, which was later incorporated into his book Spanish Testament. In 1937 he returned to Loyalist Spain as a war correspondent of News Chronicle but was captured by the Nationalist rebels. From February until June, he was imprisoned under sentence of death. He was eventually exchanged for a 'high value' Nationalist prisoner held by the Loyalists, the wife of one of Franco's ace fighter pilots. He is one of the few authors to have been sentenced to death and witnessed death row. He wrote about this in Dialogue with Death.
After his release, Koestler returned to France, where he agreed to write a sex encyclopaedia to support himself. It was published to great success under the title The Encyclopœdia of Sexual Knowledge under the pseudonyms of "Drs. A. Costler, A. Willy, and Others".^[18] In July 1938, he finished work on his novel The Gladiators. Later that year he resigned from the Communist Party and started work on a new novel that in 1941 was published in London with the title Darkness at Noon. That same year, 1938, he became editor of Die Zukunft (The Future), the German weekly paper in Paris.^[19]
In 1939 he met and formed an attachment to the British sculptor Daphne Hardy. They lived together in Paris, and she translated the manuscript of Darkness at Noon from German into English in early 1940. She smuggled it out of France when they left ahead of the German occupation, and arranged for its publication after reaching London that year.

The war years, 1940–45[edit]

After the outbreak of World War II, Koestler was detained for several months in Le Vernet Internment Camp among other 'undesirable aliens', mostly refugees.^[20] They released him in early 1940 due to strong British pressure. (Koestler described the period 1939 to 1940 and his incarceration in Le Vernet in his memoir Scum of the Earth.) Shortly before the German invasion of France, to get out of the country he joined the French Foreign Legion. He deserted in North Africa, and tried to get back to England.^[21] While waiting to gain passage on a ship out of Lisbon, he heard a false report that the ship on which Hardy was travelling had sunk, and that she and his manuscript were lost. He attempted suicide, but survived.
Arriving in England without an entry permit, Koestler was imprisoned by the British pending examination of his case. He was still in prison when his book Darkness at Noon was published in early 1941, which Hardy had arranged. Immediately upon release, he volunteered for army service. While awaiting his call-up papers he wrote Scum of the Earth (January–March 1941), the first book he wrote in English. For the next twelve months, he served in the Pioneer Corps.

January 1945, Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, Koestler is 5th from the right

In March 1942, Koestler was assigned to the Ministry of Information, where he worked as a scriptwriter for propaganda broadcasts and films.^[22] In his spare time, he wrote Arrival and Departure, the third in his trilogy of novels which included Darkness at Noon. He wrote several essays, which were subsequently collected and published in The Yogi and the Commissar. One of the essays, titled "On Disbelieving Atrocities" (originally published in the New York Times)^[23] was about Nazi atrocities against the Jews.
Daphne Hardy, who had been doing war work in Oxford, joined Koestler in London in 1943, but they parted company a few months later. They remained good friends until Koestler's death.^[24]
In December 1944, he travelled to Palestine with accreditation from The Times newspaper. There he had a clandestine meeting with Menachem Begin; the head of the Irgun terrorist organisation, who was wanted by the British armed forces and had a £500 bounty on his head. Koestler tried to persuade him to abandon militant attacks and accept a two-state solution for Palestine, but failed. Many years later, Koestler wrote in his memoirs: “When the meeting was over, I realised how naïve I had been to imagine that my arguments would have even the slightest influence.”^[25]
Staying in Palestine until August 1945, Koestler collected material for his next novel Thieves in the Night. When he returned to England, Mamaine Paget, whom he had started to see before going out to Palestine, was waiting for him.^[26][27]

The post-war years[edit]

1945–55[edit]

Arthur Koestler with Mamaine Paget, Robie Macauley, and Flannery O'Connor on a visit to the Amana Colonies in 1947. Photo by C. Cameron Macauley.

For two years, 1945–47, Koestler worked on Insight and Outlook. In March 1948 he went on a literary and political lecture tour in the United States.
Soon after his return from the U.S., war broke out between the newly declared State of Israel and the neighbouring Arab states. Koestler was accredited by several newspapers: American, British and French, and travelled to Israel to report on the war.^[28] Mamaine Paget went with him. They arrived in Israel on 4 June and stayed there until October.^[29] Later that year they decided to leave England for a while and move to France. News that his long-pending application for British nationality had been granted reached him in France in late December. Early in the new year (1949), he returned to London to swear the oath of allegiance to the British Crown.^[30] In January 1949 Koestler and Mamaine moved to a house he bought in France, where he wrote a contribution to The God That Failed and finished work on Promise and Fulfilment. The book received poor reviews in both the U.S. and in England. His other book published in 1949 was Insight and Outlook. This too received lukewarm reviews.
In July he commenced work on the first volume of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue. He hired a new part-time secretary, Cynthia Jefferies, who eventually became his third wife. In the autumn he started work on The Age of Longing, on which he continued to work until mid-1950.
Having reached agreement with his first wife, Dorothy, for an amicable divorce, their marriage was annulled on 15 December 1949.^[31] This cleared the way for his marriage to Mamaine Paget,^[32] which took place on 15 April 1950 at the British Consulate in Paris.^[33]
In June he delivered a major anti-Communist speech at the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, in Berlin. In the autumn he went to the United States on a lecture tour, during which he lobbied for permanent resident status in the U.S. At the end of October, on impulse, he bought a small island with a house on it on the Delaware River near New Hope, Pennsylvania, with the intention of living there at least for part of each year.^[34]
In January 1951 a dramatised version of Darkness at Noon, by Sidney Kingsley, opened in New York. Critics loved the play and it won the New York Drama Critics' Award. Koestler donated all royalties from the play to a fund he set up to help struggling authors, “Fund for Intellectual Freedom" (FIF)^[35] In 1951 the last of his political works, The Age of Longing, was published. In it he examined the political landscape of post-war Europe and the problems facing the continent.
In August 1952, his marriage to Mamaine collapsed. They separated but remained close until her sudden and unexpected death in June 1954.^[36][37] The book Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945-51, edited by Mamaine's twin sister Celia Goodman, gives an insight into their lives together. He decided to make his permanent home in England. In May 1953 he bought a three-storey Georgian town house on Montpelier Square in London, and sold his houses in France and the United States.
The first two volumes of his autobiography, Arrow in the Blue, which covers his life up to December 1931 when he joined the German Communist Party, and The Invisible Writing, which covers the years 1932 to 1940, were published in 1952 and 1954, respectively. A collection of essays, The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays, on the perils facing Western civilisation, was published in 1955.
On 13 April 1955, Janine Graetz, with whom Koestler had an on-off relationship over a period of years, gave birth to his daughter.^[38] She was called Cristina, and despite repeated attempts by Janine to persuade him to show some interest in her, Koestler had almost no contact with his daughter throughout his life.
Koestler's main polemic during 1955 was his campaign for the abolition of capital punishment and hanging. In July he started work on Reflections on Hanging.

1956–75[edit]

Although Koestler resumed work on Kepler's biography in 1955 it was not published until 1959, and in the interim it acquired the title The Sleepwalkers. The emphasis of the book changed to 'A history of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe', which also became the book's subtitle. Copernicus and Galileo were added to Kepler as the major subjects of the book. Early in 1956 he arranged for Cynthia to have an illegal abortion.^[39] Later in the year as a consequence of the Hungarian Uprising he was busy organising anti-Soviet meetings and protests.
In June 1957 Koestler gave a lecture at a symposium in Alpbach, Austria, and fell in love with the village; he bought land there, had a house built and for the next twelve years used it as a place for summer vacations and for organising symposia. In May 1958 he had a hernia operation.^[40] In December he left for the East – India and Japan – and was away until early 1959. The resulting book was The Lotus and the Robot.
In early 1960, on his way back from a conference in San Francisco, he interrupted his journey at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where some experimental research was going on with hallucinogens. He tried psilocybin and had a "bad trip". Later, when he arrived at Harvard to see Timothy Leary he experimented with more drugs, but was not enthusiastic about that experience either.^[41] In November 1960 he was elected to a Fellowship of The Royal Society of Literature. Koestler's book The Act of Creation came out in May 1964. In November he undertook a lecture tour of various universities in California. In 1965 he married Cynthia in New York,^[42] and moved to California, where, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, he participated in a series of seminars.
Koestler spent most of 1966 and the early months of 1967 working on The Ghost in the Machine. In his article Return Trip to Nirvana, published in 1967 in the Sunday Telegraph, Koestler wrote about the drug culture and his own experiences with hallucinogens. The article also challenged the defence of drugs in Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. In April 1968, Koestler was awarded the Sonning Prize “For outstanding contribution to European culture”. The Ghost in the Machine was published in August of same year and in the autumn he received an honorary doctorate from Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. In the later part of November the Koestlers flew to Australia for a number of television appearances and press interviews.
At the end of the decade, Koestler was elated to learn that the British House of Lords had finally consented to the abolition of hanging, for which he had been campaigning for many years. The first half of the 1970s saw the publication of four more of his books: The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), The Roots of Coincidence and The Call-Girls (both in 1972), and The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973 (1974). In the New Year Honours List for 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).

Final years, 1976–83[edit]

Early in 1976 Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The trembling of his hand made writing progressively more difficult.^[43] He cut back on overseas trips and spent the summer months at the farmhouse in Denston, Suffolk, which he had bought in 1971. That same year saw the publication of The Thirteenth Tribe, about the hypothetical Khazar origins of European Jewry.
In 1978 he published Janus: A Summing Up. Two years later, in 1980, he was diagnosed also with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. Walking and writing became an effort and Koestler's physical condition visibly deteriorated^[44] but he kept on working. His book Bricks to Babel was published that year. His final book, Kaleidoscope: Essays from Drinkers of Infinity and The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973 and some later pieces and stories was published the following year, 1981.
During the final years of his life he established the KIB Society (with Brian Inglis and Tony Bloomfield), to sponsor research "outside the scientific orthodoxies" (which, after his death, was renamed The Koestler Foundation), and in his capacity as Vice President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, later renamed Exit, he wrote a pamphlet on suicide, outlining the case both for and against, with a section dealing specifically with how best to do it.^[45]
Koestler and Cynthia killed themselves on the evening of 1 March 1983.^[46][47]

Death and its controversies[edit]

Koestler had stated more than once that he was not afraid of being dead but was afraid of the process of dying.^[48] He did not wish to suffer the indignity of losing control over his body or mind. His suicide was not unexpected among close friends. Shortly before his suicide, his doctor had discovered a swelling in the groin which indicated a metastasis of the cancer. He and his wife killed themselves on 1 March 1983^[49][50][51] with an overdose of barbiturates (Tuinal), taken with alcohol.^[52] Their bodies were discovered on the morning of 3 March, by which time they had been dead for thirty-six hours.
Koestler's suicide note:^[53]

To whom it may concern. The purpose of this note is to make it unmistakably clear that I intend to commit suicide by taking an overdose of drugs without the knowledge or aid of any other person. The drugs have been legally obtained and hoarded over a considerable period. Trying to commit suicide is a gamble the outcome of which will be known to the gambler only if the attempt fails, but not if it succeeds. Should this attempt fail and I survive it in a physically or mentally impaired state, in which I can no longer control what is done to me, or communicate my wishes, I hereby request that I be allowed to die in my own home and not be resuscitated or kept alive by artificial means. I further request that my wife, or a physician, or any friend present, should invoke habeas corpus against any attempt to remove me forcibly from my house to hospital. My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's Disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acute state with added complications which make it advisable to seek self-deliverance now, before I become incapable of making the necessary arrangements. I wish my friends to know that I am leaving their company in a peaceful frame of mind, with some timid hopes for a de-personalised after-life beyond due confines of space, time and matter and beyond the limits of our comprehension. This 'oceanic feeling' has often sustained me at difficult moments, and does so now, while I am writing this. What makes it nevertheless hard to take this final step is the reflection of the pain it is bound to inflict on my surviving friends, above all my wife Cynthia. It is to her that I owe the relative peace and happiness that I enjoyed in the last period of my life – and never before.

The note was dated June 1982. Below it appeared the following:

Since the above was written in June 1982, my wife decided that after thirty-four years of working together she could not face life after my death.

Further down the page appeared Cynthia's own farewell note:

I fear both death and the act of dying that lies ahead of us. I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur – a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources. Double suicide has never appealed to me, but now Arthur's incurable diseases have reached a stage where there is nothing else to do.

The funeral was held at the Mortlake Crematorium in South London on 11 March.^[46]
The first controversy arose about why he allowed or consented to his wife's simultaneous suicide. She was only fifty-five years old and believed to be in good health. In a typewritten addition to her husband's suicide note, Cynthia Koestler wrote that she could not live without her husband. Reportedly, few of their friends were surprised by this admission, apparently perceiving that Cynthia lived her life through her husband's and that she had no "life of her own".^[54] Her absolute devotion to Koestler can be seen clearly in her partially completed memoirs.^[55]
According to a profile of Koestler by Peter Kurth:^[56]

All their friends were troubled by what Julian Barnes calls "the unmentionable, half-spoken question" of Koestler's responsibility for Cynthia's actions. "Did he bully her into it?" asks Barnes. And "if he didn't bully her into it, why didn't he bully her out of it?" Because, with hindsight, the evidence that Cynthia's life had been ebbing with her husband's was all too apparent.

The second controversy was occasioned by the terms of his will. With the exception of some minor bequests, Koestler left the residue of his estate, about £1 million, to promote research into the paranormal through the founding of a chair in parapsychology at a university in Britain. The Trustees of the Estate had great difficulty finding a university willing to establish such a chair. Oxford, Cambridge, King's College London, and University College London, were approached and all refused. Eventually, the Trustees reached agreement with Edinburgh University to set up a chair in accordance with Koestler's request.^[57]

Controversial personal life[edit]

Koestler's relations with women have been a source of controversy. In 1998, a biography of Koestler by David Cesarani alleged that Koestler had been a serial rapist, citing as evidence that the British feminist writer Jill Craigie had claimed that she had been one of his victims in 1951. Feminist protesters forced the removal of his bust from Edinburgh University.^[58]
In his biography Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual (2009), Michael Scammell countered that Craigie was the only woman to go on record that she had been raped by Koestler, and had revealed this at a dinner party over 50 years after the alleged incident. Claims that Koestler had been violent were only added by Craigie later, although Scammell concedes that Koestler could be rough and sexually aggressive.
Others, including Cesarani, claim that Koestler had misogynistic tendencies. He reportedly engaged in numerous sexual affairs and generally treated the women in his life badly. As argued by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in a review of Cesarani's biography, philandering on this scale is neurotic: a man driven to copulate with as many women as possible not only has difficulty establishing happy relations with women, or regarding them as equals, but does not like women.^[59][60][61]

Influence and legacy[edit]

"It is difficult to think of a single important twentieth-century intellectual who did not cross paths with Arthur Koestler, or a single important twentieth-century intellectual movement that Koestler did not either join or oppose. From progressive education and Freudian psychoanalysis through Zionism, communism, and existentialism to psychedelic drugs, parapsychology, and euthanasia, Koestler was fascinated by every philosophical fad, serious and unserious, political and apolitical, of his era."

– Anne Applebaum, The New York Review Of Books^[3]

Darkness at Noon was one of the most influential anti-Soviet books ever written.^[62] Its influence in Europe on Communists and sympathisers and, indirectly, on the outcomes of elected governments, was substantial.^[63] Ultimately, a writer's legacy is the body of his writing. Geoffrey Wheatcroft believes his most important books were the five completed before he was 40: his first memoirs and the trilogy of anti-totalitarian novels that included Darkness at Noon.^[59]
Koestler wrote several major novels, two volumes of autobiographical works, two volumes of reportage, a major work on the history of science, several volumes of essays and a considerable body of other writing and articles on subjects as varied as genetics, euthanasia, Eastern mysticism, neurology, chess, evolution, psychology, the paranormal and more.^[64]

Politics and causes[edit]

Koestler embraced a multitude of political as well as non-political issues. Zionism, Communism, anti-Communism, voluntary euthanasia, abolition of capital punishment, particularly hanging, and the abolition of quarantining of dogs being re-imported into the United Kingdom are examples.

Evolution[edit]

In his 1971 book The Case of the Midwife Toad he defended the biologist Paul Kammerer, who claimed to find experimental support for Lamarckian inheritance. According to Koestler Kammerer's experiments on the midwife toad may have been tampered with by a Nazi sympathizer at the University of Vienna. In the book he came to the conclusion that a kind of modified 'Mini-Lamarckism' may occur as an explanation for some limited and rare evolutionary phenomena.
Koestler had criticised neo-Darwinism in a number of his books but he was not anti-evolution.^[65] Biology professor Harry Gershenowitz described Koestler as a "popularizer" of science despite his views not being accepted by the "orthodox academic community".^[66] According to an article in the Skeptical Inquirer Koestler was an "advocate of Lamarckian evolution — and a critic of Darwinian natural selection as well as a believer in psychic phenomena."^[67]

Paranormal[edit]

Mysticism and a fascination with the paranormal imbued much of his later work. Koestler was known for endorsing a number of paranormal subjects such as extrasensory perception, psychokinesis and telepathy. His book The Roots of Coincidence (1974) claims the answer to such paranormal phenomena may be found in theoretical physics. The book mentions yet another line of unconventional research by Paul Kammerer, the theory of coincidence or synchronicity. He also presents critically the related writings of Carl Jung. More controversial were Koestler's levitation and telepathy studies and experiments.
During the final years of his life he established the KIB Society (with Brian Inglis and Tony Bloomfield), to sponsor paranormal research (which, after his death, was renamed the Koestler Parapsychology Unit) and is located at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland.^[68]

Hallucinogens[edit]

In "Return Trip to Nirvana", published in the Sunday Telegraph in 1967, Koestler wrote about the drug culture and his own experiences with hallucinogens. He challenged the defence of drug use in Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception.

Judaism[edit]

Koestler was Jewish by birth, but did not observe the religion. In an interview published in the London Jewish Chronicle in 1950, he argued that Jews should either immigrate to Israel or assimilate completely into their local cultures.^[69][70][71]
In The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), he advanced the controversial thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the Israelites of antiquity, but from the Khazars, a Turkic people in the Caucasus. They were believed to have converted to Judaism in the 8th century and were later forced westward into present-day Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Koestler argued that a proof that Ashkenazi Jews had no biological connection to the biblical Jews would remove the racial basis of European anti-Semitism.
However, from studying DNA in sample populations, Rabbi Yaakov Kleiman suggested in 2000 that widely separated Jewish populations have a common origin that traces back to the Middle East.^[72]

Languages[edit]

Koestler first learned Hungarian, but later at home, his family spoke mostly German. From his early years, he became fluent in both languages. It is likely that he picked up some Yiddish too, through contact with his grandfather.^[73] By his teens, he was fluent in Hungarian, German, French, and English.^[74]
During his years in Palestine, Koestler became sufficiently fluent in Hebrew to write stories in that language, as well as create the world's first Hebrew crossword puzzle.^[75] During his years in the Soviet Union (1932–33), although he arrived with a vocabulary of only 1,000 words of Russian, and no grammar, he picked up enough colloquial Russian to speak the language.^[76]
His first novel, The Gladiators (1939), was the only one he wrote in Hungarian. He wrote his other works up to 1940 in German. After 1940, he wrote only in English. (L'Espagne ensanglantée was translated into French from German.^[77])

Published works[edit]

Fiction (novels)[edit]

• 1934 (2013). Die Erlebnisse des Genossen Piepvogel in der Emigration
• 1939. The Gladiators, about the revolt of Spartacus.
• 1940. Darkness at Noon
• 1943. Arrival and Departure
• 1946. Thieves in the Night
• 1951. The Age of Longing
• 1972. The Call-Girls: A Tragicomedy with a Prologue and Epilogue. A novel about scholars making a living on the international seminar-conference circuit. ISBN 978-0-09-112550-9

Drama[edit]

• 1945. Twilight Bar.

Autobiography[edit]

• 1937. Spanish Testament.
• 1941. Scum of the Earth.
• 1942. Dialogue with Death.
• 1952. Arrow In The Blue: The First Volume Of An Autobiography, 1905–31, 2005 reprint, ISBN 0-09-949067-6
• 1954. The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume Of An Autobiography, 1932–40, 1984 reprint, ISBN 0-8128-6218-X
• 1984. Stranger on the Square co-written with Cynthia Koestler, published posthumously, edited and with an Introduction and Epilogue by Harold Harris, London: Hutchinson, 1984, ISBN 0-09-154330-4.

NB The books The Lotus and the Robot, The God that Failed, and Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen, as well as his numerous essays, all may contain further autobiographical information.

Other non-fiction[edit]

• 1934. Von weissen Nächten und roten Tagen. About Koestler's travels in the USSR. In his The Invisible Writing, Koestler calls the book Red Days and White Nights, or, more usually, Red Days. Of the five foreign language editions − Russian, German, Ukrainian, Georgian, Armenian − planned, only the German version was eventually published in Kharkov, Ukrainian S.S.R.. The edition is very rare.
• 1937. L'Espagne ensanglantée.
• 1941 Scum of the Earth. Memoir of his life in France before and after the outbreak of World War II, with a detailed account of his internment at Le Vernet, the French camp for aliens.
• 1942 (summer) Le yogi et le commissaire.
• 1945. The Yogi and the Commissar and other essays.
• 1949. The Challenge of our Time.
• 1949. Promise and Fulfilment: Palestine 1917–1949.
• 1949. Insight and Outlook.
• 1955. The Trail of the Dinosaur and other essays.
• 1956. Reflections on Hanging.
• 1959. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe. ISBN 0-14-019246-8 An account of changing scientific paradigms.
• 1960. The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. (excerpted from The Sleepwalkers.) ISBN 0-385-09576-7
• 1960. The Lotus and the Robot, ISBN 0-09-059891-1. Koestler's journey to India and Japan, and his assessment of East and West.
• 1961. Control of the Mind.
• 1961. Hanged by the Neck. Reuses some material from Reflections on Hanging.
• 1963. Suicide of a Nation.
• 1964. The Act of Creation.
• 1967. The Ghost in the Machine. Penguin reprint 1990: ISBN 0-14-019192-5.
• 1968. Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967.
• 1970. The Age of Longing, ISBN 0-09-104520-7.
• 1971. The Case of the Midwife Toad, ISBN 0-394-71823-2. An account of Paul Kammerer's research on Lamarckian evolution and what he called "serial coincidences".
• 1972. The Roots of Coincidence, ISBN 0-394-71934-4. Sequel to The Case of the Midwife Toad.
• 1973. The Lion and the Ostrich.
• 1974. The Heel of Achilles: Essays 1968-1973, ISBN 0-09-119400-8.
• 1976. The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, ISBN 0-394-40284-7.
• 1976. Astride the Two Cultures: Arthur Koestler at 70, ISBN 0-394-40063-1.
• 1977. Twentieth Century Views: A Collection of Critical Essays, ISBN 0-13-049213-2.
• 1978. Janus: A Summing Up, ISBN 0-394-50052-0. Sequel to The Ghost in the Machine
• 1980. Bricks to Babel. Random House, ISBN 0-394-51897-7. This 1980 anthology of passages from many of his books, described as "A selection from 50 years of his writings, chosen and with new commentary by the author", is a comprehensive introduction to Koestler's writing and thought.
• 1981. Kaleidoscope. Essays from Drinkers of Infinity and The Heel of Achilles, plus later pieces and stories.

Writings as a contributor[edit]

• The Encyclopœdia of Sexual Knowledge (1934) (In his autobiography The Invisible Writing, Koestler uses the ligature œ in the spelling of the word "Encyclopaedia".)
• Foreign Correspondent (1940) uncredited contributor to Alfred Hitchcock film produced by Walter Wanger

• The God That Failed (1950) (collection of testimonies by ex-Communists)
• Attila, the Poet (1954) (Encounter; 1954.2 (5)). On loan at the UCL library of the School of Slavonic & Eastern European Studies.
• UCL library online
• Beyond Reductionism: The Alpbach Symposium. New Perspectives in the Life Sciences (co-editor with J. R. Smythies, 1969), ISBN 0-8070-1535-0
• The Challenge of Chance: A Mass Experiment in Telepathy and Its Unexpected Outcome (1973)
• The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art (1976)
• Life After Death, (co-editor, 1976)
• Humour and Wit. I: Encyclopædia Britannica. 15th ed. vol. 9.(1983)
• humour – Encyclopædia Britannica (by Arthur Koestler)

Biographies of Koestler[edit]

• Atkins, J., 1956. Arthur Koestler.
• Buckard, Christian G., 2004. Arthur Koestler: Ein extremes Leben 1905–1983. ISBN 3-406-52177-0.
• Cesarani, David, 1998. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. ISBN 0-684-86720-6.
• Hamilton, Iain, 1982. Koestler: A Biography. ISBN 0-02-547660-2.
• Koestler, Mamaine, 1985. Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945-51. ISBN 0-297-78531-1 or ISBN 0-312-49029-1.
• Levene, M., 1984. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 0-8044-6412-X
• Mikes, George, 1983. Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship. ISBN 0-233-97612-4.
• Pearson, S. A., 1978. Arthur Koestler. ISBN 0-8057-6699-5.
• [Michael] (2009). Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. New York: Random House. p. 689. ISBN 978-0-394-57630-5. Unknown parameter |note= ignored (help)

NB Langston Hughes's autobiography also documents their meeting in Turkestan during the Soviet era.

See also[edit]

• Herbert A. Simon
• Holism
• Holon (philosophy)
• Janus
• Politics in fiction
• German Writers in French Exile, 1933–1940, by Martin Mauthner (London, 2007), ISBN 9780853035404.

References[edit]

Key to abbreviations used for frequently quoted sources

• ACK Stranger on the Square (A & C Koestler)

• AIB Arrow in the Blue (A Koestler)

• CG Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945-51 (Celia Goodman, Ed.)

• GM Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship (George Mikes)

• IW The Invisible Writing (A Koestler)

1. ^ There is a discrepancy between the various biographers in the spelling of the surname. David Cesarani uses the spelling Jeffries, Iain Hamilton, Harold Harris (in his Introduction to Living with Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945–51, Celia Goodman in the same book and Mark Levene in Arthur Koestler spell it Jefferies.
2. ^ A. & C. Koestler (ACK) Stranger on the Square, London: Hutchinson 1984, ISBN 978-0-09-154330-3, p. 10.
3. ^ ^{a b} Did The Death Of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It? by Anne Applebaum, The Huffington Post, 26 January 2010
4. ^ Scammell, Michael (2009). Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic. New York: Random House. pp. 6–7 (Leopold Koestler), 7 (Zeiteles), 8–9 (parents' marriage), 10 (Koestler's birth). ISBN 978-0-394-57630-5.
5. ^ Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (AIB), Collins with Hamish Hamilton, 1952, p. 21.
6. ^ AIB p. 86.
7. ^ AIB pp. 115–21.
8. ^ AIB p. 125-32.
9. ^ AIB pp. 137, 165.
10. ^ Cesarani p57
11. ^ AIB pp. 183–86.
12. ^ AIB p. 212.
13. ^ Cesarani pp. 69–70.
14. ^ Hamilton, David. (Hamilton) Koestler, Secker & Warburg, London 1982, ISBN 0-436-19101-6, p. 14.
15. ^ AIB pp. 303–04.
16. ^ ACK p. 24.
17. ^ Koestler, Dialogue with Death, London: Arrow Books, 1961, p. 7 (no ISBN).
18. ^ IW p. 260.
19. ^ IW p. 495.
20. ^ IW p. 509.
21. ^ ACK pp. 20–22.
22. ^ ACK p. 28.
23. ^ January 1944.
24. ^ Celia Goodman, ed. (CG), Living With Koestler: Mamaine Koestler's Letters 1945–51, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985, ISBN 0-297-78531-1, p. 7.
25. ^ ACK p. 37.
26. ^ ACK pp. 29–38.
27. ^ CG p .21.
28. ^ Hamilton, p. 146.
29. ^ CG pp. 84 & 94.
30. ^ Cesarani p. 325.
31. ^ CG p. 120.
32. ^ CG pp. 120 & 131.
33. ^ CG p. 131.
34. ^ Cesarani pp. 375–76.
35. ^ ACK pp. 103-07.
36. ^ ACK pp. 139–40.
37. ^ CG p. 193.
38. ^ Cesarani p. 425.
39. ^ Cesarani, p. 443.
40. ^ Cesarani p. 453.
41. ^ Cesarani pp. 467–68.
42. ^ Cesarani p. 484.
43. ^ Cesarani p. 535.
44. ^ Cesarani p. 542.
45. ^ Cesarani pp. 542-43.
46. ^ ^{a b} Cesarani p. 547.
47. ^ George Mikes, Arthur Koestler: The Story of a Friendship, London: Andre Deutsch, 1983, p. 76. ISBN 0-233-97612-4
48. ^ GM p. 75.
49. ^ GM p. 76.
50. ^ Cesarani p. 546.
51. ^ ACK p. 11.
52. ^ GM pp. 75–78.
53. ^ GM pp. 78–79. (This information is in the public domain.)
54. ^ ACK pp. 10–11.
55. ^ ACK Part Two
56. ^ "Koestler'S Legacy". Peterkurth.com. 3 March 1983. Retrieved 8 January 2010.
57. ^ Cesarani p. 551.
58. ^ "Women force removal of Koestler bust". BBC. 29 December 1998. Retrieved 19 July 2009.
59. ^ ^{a b} Geoffrey Wheatcroft (20 November 1998). "The darkness at noon for Arthur Koestler was in his heart...". New Statesman. UK. Retrieved 8 January 2010.
60. ^ Lister, David (23 February 1999). "Storm as Raphael defends rapist Koestler – News". The Independent (UK). Retrieved 8 January 2010.
61. ^ "UK | Women force removal of Koestler bust". BBC News. 29 December 1998. Retrieved 8 January 2010.
62. ^ See, for example, John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War. Norton, 2009.
63. ^ Theodore Dalrymple: Drinkers of Infinity http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_2_oh_to_be.html
64. ^ Cesarani p. 557.
65. ^ Can Genes Learn? Arthur Koestler Thinks So
66. ^ Arthur Koestler's Osculation with Lamarckism and Neo-Lamarckism by Harry Gershenowitz
67. ^ The Skeptical Inquirer. (1985). Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. p. 274
68. ^ Koestler Parapsychology Unit
69. ^ Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, London: Chatto and Windus, 1998, p. 183.
70. ^ Jewish Chronicle, 5 May 1950.
71. ^ Arthur Koestler, "Judah at the Crossroads," in The Trail of the Dinosaur and Other Essays, London, 1955, pp. 106–142.
72. ^ Kleiman, Yaakov (2004). DNA & Tradition: The Genetic Link to the Ancient Hebrews. Devora Publishing. p. 30. "The general Ashkenazi paternal gene pool does not appear to be similar to that of present-day Turkish speakers. This finding opposes the suggestion that most Ashkenazim are descended from the Khazars, the Turkish-Asian empire that converted to Judaism en masse in or about the 8th century C.E."
73. ^ Cesarani pp. 20–21.
74. ^ Hamilton p. 4.
75. ^ AIB p. 153.
76. ^ Cesarani p. 84.
77. ^ IW, pp. 408–09.

External links[edit]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (January 2012)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Arthur Koestler

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Arthur Koestler

• Koestler CBC Radio December 14, 2011: Interview with biographer Michael Scammell on the Ideas podcast.
• Road Warrior Article in December 2009 issue of the New Yorker. Differs with the Wikipedia entry on many features of Koestler's biography.
• E., Holuber: Dostoevsky's Grandson
• Remembering Arthur Koestler
• Autobiographical Video-Interview with Arthur Koestler in French with German sub-titles and comments
• 2007 City Journal article on Koestler
• Arthur Koestler Project
• Duncan Fallowell (Summer 1984). "Arthur Koestler, The Art of Fiction No. 80". The Paris Review.
• General Properties of Koestler's Open hierarchical Systems
• Hungarian site on Koestler
• Koestler's Legacy – Fortean Times article on the centenary of Koestler's birth
• Koestler Parapsychology Unit – Koestler and his third spouse left a large sum of money for research into parapsychology: this funded, among other things, the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University
• Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler
• NNDB
• Online biography
• The Koestler Trust
• Arthur Koestler at Wikiquote
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Scammell about Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, 10 January 2010

[show] v t e Recipients of the Sonning Prize Sir Winston Churchill (1950) Albert Schweitzer (1959) Bertrand Russell (1960) Niels Bohr (1961) Alvar Aalto (1962) Karl Barth (1963) Dominique Pire (1964) Richard Nikolaus Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi (1965) Laurence Olivier (1966) Willem A. Visser't Hooft (1967) Arthur Koestler (1968) Halldór Laxness (1969) Max Tau (1970) Danilo Dolci (1971) Karl Popper (1973) Hannah Arendt (1975) Arne Næss (1977) Hermann Gmeiner (1979) Dario Fo (1981) Simone de Beauvoir (1983) William Heinesen (1985) Jürgen Habermas (1987) Ingmar Bergman (1989) Václav Havel (1991) Krzysztof Kieślowski (1994) Günter Grass (1996) Jørn Utzon (1998) Eugenio Barba (2000) Mary Robinson (2002) Mona Hatoum (2004) Ágnes Heller (2006) Renzo Piano (2008) Hans Magnus Enzensberger (2010) Orhan Pamuk (2012)

Authority control WorldCat VIAF: 59084510 LCCN: n79109681 GND: 118564536

Persondata
Name	Koestler, Arthur
Alternative names	Kösztler Artúr
Short description	British/Hungarian writer
Date of birth	5 September 1905
Place of birth	Budapest, Hungary
Date of death	3 March 1983
Place of death	London, England

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arthur_Koestler&oldid=563750635"

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Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983)

.............................................

Mystical Experiences of Arthur Koestler (1905 - 1983) Arthur Koestler is best known for his novel about the abuses of communism, Darkness at Noon. He also wrote a wide-ranging look at inspiration and creativity in The Act of Creation. In his autobiography, The Invisible Writing, Koestler shares a life changing experience that occurred when he was accused of being a spy during the Spanish Civil War and imprisoned in solitary confinement. "I was standing at the recessed window of cell No. 40 and with a piece of iron-spring that I had extracted from the wire mattress, was scratching mathematical formulae on the wall. Mathematics, in particular analytical geometry, had been the favorite hobby of my youth, neglected later on for many years. I was trying to remember how to derive the formula of the hyperbola, and was stumped; then I tried the ellipse and parabola, and to my delight succeeded. Next I went on to recall Euclid's proof that the number of primes is infinite... Since I had become acquainted with Euclid's proof at school, it had always filled me with a deep satisfaction that was aesthetic rather than intellectual. Now, as I recalled the method and scratched the symbols on the wall, I felt the same enchantment. And then, for the first time, I suddenly understood the reason for this enchantment: the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means. The infinite is a mystical mass shrouded in a haze; and yet it was possible to gain some knowledge of it without losing oneself in treacly ambiguities. The significance of this swept over me like a wave. The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that "this is perfect---perfect"; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind---some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: "So what? is that all? have you got nothing more serious to worry about?"---an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence. It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere. Then there was no river and no I. The I had ceased to exist. When I say "the I had ceased to exist," I refer to a concrete experience that is verbally as incommunicable as the feeling aroused by a piano concerto, yet just as real---only much more real. In fact, its primary mark is the sensation that this state is more real than any other one has experienced before---that for the first time the veil has fallen and one is in touch with "real reality," the hidden order of things, the X-ray texture of the world, normally obscured by layers of irrelevancy. What distinguishes this type of experience from the emotional entrancements of music, landscapes or love is that the former has a definitely intellectual, or rather noumenal, content. It is meaningful, though not in verbal terms. Verbal transcriptions that come nearest to it are: the unity and interlocking of everything that exists, an interdependence like that of gravitational fields or communicating vessels. The "I" ceases to exist because it has, by a kind of mental osmosis, established communication with, and been dissolved in, the universal pool. It is the process of dissolution and limitless expansion which is sensed as the "oceanic feeling," as the draining of all tension, the absolute catharsis, the peace that passeth all understanding. The coming-back to the lower order of reality I found to be gradual, like waking up from anaesthesia. There was the equation of the parabola scratched on the dirty wall, the iron bed and the iron table and the strip of blue Andalusian sky. But there was no unpleasant hangover as from other modes of intoxication. On the contrary: there remained a sustained and invigorating, serene and fear-dispelling after-effect that lasted for hours and days. It was as if a massive dose of vitamins had been injected into the veins. Or, to change the metaphor, I resumed my travels through my cell like an old car with its batteries freshly recharged. Whether the experience had lasted for a few minutes or an hour, I never knew. In the beginning it occurred two or even three times a week, then the intervals became longer. It could never be voluntarily induced. After my liberation it recurred at even longer intervals, perhaps once or twice in a year. But by that time the groundwork for a change or personality was completed. I shall henceforth refer to these experiences as "the hours by the window." Koestler, Arthur. The Invisible Writing, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1954, pp.350-354. Quoted in Walter T. Stace The Teachings of the Mystics, (New York: New American Library, 1960), pp. 230-235. Ref Mystical Experiences Registry Blogger Ref Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

Biophysical picture representation by Bókkon

From biophotons to biophysical picture representation:
why I could have so vivid visual dreams
by István Bókkon
2013

We can term noetic as various authors that write about consciousness (matter, physical world, science thoughts), spirituality (soul, beliefs, metaphysics) and cosmology (science, genesis, intentions, information). In reality, these things cannot be separated. I think that my work and my new model is exact example of noetic. I hope that my researcher of biophysical picture representation(virtual biophysical picture reality in the V1, internally generated virtual biophysical picture perception) can bring a brand new ways in the brain and cellular researchers, visual prosthesis, and artificial intelligence, etc. in the future. This biophysical picture representation model could explain numerous brain related phenomena in a convergent manner such as phosphenes, negative afterimages, saccades, retinal discrete dark noise, blind sight, visual imagery and perception, REM dream pictures, visual hallucination, autism, savant skill, some color illusions, synaesthesia, the appearance of brilliant lights during near ¬death experiences, correlated brain signals between physically and sensory isolated subjects among them.

I always wondered about my vivid visual dreams and I did not understand how my dreams could be emerged by mere neural electrical representations, because these looked like as the real pictures during my visual perception in awake state. I was also surprised that when I sometimes rub my closed eyes I could see highly luminous stars (namely, I could see pressure phosphenes originated within the eyes). When I read the first articles about biophotons somehow I felt that these may give answers to the origin of my visual dreams and to luminous stars in my pressured eyes. Around this time I started my theoretical research work for six long years.

In my first published paper (in my new way topic) I pointed out that all types of phosphenes can be explained by free-radical and biophotonic processes. Namely, unregulated overproduction of free radicals and excited biomolecules can produce a transient increase of ultraweak biophotons in different regions of the visual system. If this excess biophoton emission exceeds a distinct threshold (phosphene threshold), it can appear as phosphene lights in our mind.
I felt that phosphene phenomenon also helps prove my visual dreams. First, there were two things that did not seem right, i.e., the random/spontaneous generation of biophotons from free-radical reactions and the super weakness of biophoton intensity. Since I am chemist and biologist, I sank into research of free radical processes. Fortunately, the current research has clearly indicated that the free-radical processes are strongly regulated mechanisms. Thus, in my next articles I revealed that if the free-radical reactions are controlled processes, biophoton production can also be regulated. The second problem was the super weakness of biophoton intensity. I performed calculations and found that externally measured ultraweak biophoton emission from various cells and neurons are primarily derived from natural oxidation processes on the surfaces of cellular membranes and that the actual biophoton intensity can be drastically higher inside cells and neurons (Bókkon et al. 2010) compared with the biophoton intensity in their surrounding environment. Namely, the most significant fraction of natural biophoton production cannot be measurable but is absorbed within cells and may take part in signal processes. Later, Dotta et al. (2011) experiments supported my notion regarding cellular membranes are biophoton sources when we measure biophoton intensity of living cells.

The next question was a structural question. Because all living cells and neurons produce biophotons, what the specific is regarding to V1 (and V2) visual areas. Why are neurons special in the visual system? The specificity is the structure, namely retinotopic structure of visual system. Namely, in primates, LGN, the striate cortex (V1), and many extrastriate visual cortical areas including V2, V3, V4 are organized in a retinotopic manner, respecting the topological distribution of photon stimuli on the retina. However, V1 and V2 have "perfect" retinotopic maps. These areas are topographically organized, and they preserve the local spatial geometry of the retina, so patterns of activation in them depict shape. In addition, primary visual cortex has columnar–like structure revealed by the distribution of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase. Mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase activity are considered as endogenous markers of neuronal oxidative metabolism regulated by neuronal activity. The highest density of neurons in neocortex (number of neurons per degree of visual angle) devoted to representing the visual field is found in V1 (Rockel and Hiorns, 1980; Van Essen and Anderson, 1992). This means that the highest mitochondrial activity can be achieved in the columnar–like structures by cytochrome oxidase rich units. Thus, small units of retinotopic V1, V2 neurons with biophotons might act as “nonlinear visual pixels” respective to the topological distribution of photonic signals in the retina. Finally, it is very possible (as revealed by experiments and models) that mitochondrial oxidative metabolism is the main sources of ultraweak biophotons.
It seems everything is together. Explicitly, reflected photons from objects are absorbed by photoreceptors and converted into retinal electrical signals. Next, retinotopic electrical signals are conveyed to the V1, where spike-related electrical visual signals are induced along classical axonal-dendritic pathways. These spike-related electrical visual signals along classical axonal-dendritic pathways also produce concurrently spike-related (neural activity-dependent) biophotons within the same population of retinotopic V1 neurons through mitochondrial bioluminescent radical reactions (Bókkon, 2009; Bókkon and D'Angiulli, 2009). These synchronized and activity-dependent biophotons can spatially and temporally create pictures in the retinotopic V1 area. Thus, retinal visual information of the perceived object can be re-represented through congruent patterns of biophotons in retinotopic V1 neurons during visual imagery and visual perception.

Our biophysical concept has not only revived Kosslyn’s depictive assumption (Kosslyn, 1994 Borst and Kosslyn, 2008 Lewis et al. 2011) and the homunculus but has also argued that biophysical pictures can appear in early retinotopic visual regions. To solve the homunculus ("little man", mind's eye) dilemma we presented an iterative model (Bókkon et al. 2011a). Accordingly, a separated homunculus looks at biophysical picture representation can be a misleading view because it can be realized through iterative matching processes in visual V1 and V2 areas (Bókkon et al. 2011a; Vimal, 2008, 2010; Perlovsky 2009). The matching element reflects both physical and mental aspects of feed forward and feedback signals. In our model (Bókkon, 2009; Bókkon and D'Angiulli, 2009; Bókkon et al. 2011), long-term visual information is not stored as biophysical pictures but as neural epigenetic codes. Thus, the representation stored in long-term visual memory matches the image produced when an individual repeatedly encounters the same object.

Recently, Dotta, Saroka and Persinger (2012) and Dotta and Persinger (2011) detected spontaneous biophoton (as base level) emission from both hemispheres of the brain in dark adapted voluntaries during their simple casual thinking. They revealed a significant increases in biophoton emissions (300%) occur from the right hemisphere compared to baseline level, but not the left hemisphere, in healthy persons who imagined a white light in a dark room opposed to those who engaged in simple casual thinking. Thus, the authors observed cognitive coupling with biophoton emission in the brain during subjective visual imagery. In addition, the biophoton emissions were strongly correlated with EEG activity and the action potentials of axons.

Toward visual REM sleep dreams
Physiological and psychological processes of REM sleep are similar to waking visual imagery. The EEG pattern during REM sleep is basically indistinguishable from that during wakefulness and is characterized by low amplitudes and higher frequencies. REM dream pictures, similarly to visual imagery, can originate from long-term visual memories by iterative processes. There are increases in oxygen and glucose utilization, brain temperature, local brain blood flow and neuron activity during REM (Shvets-Ténéta-Gurii et al., 2001). REM sleep metabolic rates are as high as those seen in wakefulness. The mean levels of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase activity and blood volume during REM sleep significantly exceed those during waking and slow-wave sleep (Vern et al., 1988). Mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation dominates in waking and REM sleep, while aerobic glycolysis dominates during non-REM sleep (Shvets-Ténéta-Gurii et al., 2003). Visual imagery during REM sleep, in comparison to wakefulness, can occur through the inverse pathway of visual information processing (Cantero et al., 1999; Ogawa et al., 2006).

During REM sleep, visual imagery uses similar neural systems as those used in wakefulness (Nir and Tononi 2010 Sprenger et al. 2010). During REM sleep-associated dreams, the appearance of rapid eye movements reflects the replaying of visual information (Leclair-Visonneau et al. 2010). The results from current event-related fMRI studies revealed the activation of V1 during REM sleep (Hong et al. 2009 Miyauchi et al., 2009). One of the most important events during REM sleep is the activation of visual areas, and REM sleep associated dreams are primarily accompanied with visual replay (Hobson 1988; Bókkon and Mallick 2012). Latest experiments (Horikawa, 2013) by functional neuroimaging of the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using EEG demonstrated that dreaming and visual perception share similar neurocognitive mechanisms.

It seems everything is also together to produce biophysical pictures during visual REM dreams, similarly to visual imagery. In reality, intrinsic dynamic biophysical pictures creation by redox (free radical) regulated biophotons is an extremely complex process. Moreover, visual information is linked to other sensory modalities in the brain. However, dynamic series of pictures (generated in retinotopic visual areas by regulated bioluminescent biophotons can carry unambiguous meaning of words. The human memory can operate through intrinsic dynamic pictures and we link these pictures to each other in the learning processes.

Phosphenes
Phosphenes represent a perceived sensation of flashes of light in the absence of external visual stimulation. The most common phosphenes are pressure phosphenes, caused by rubbing the closed eyes. Earlier, I have proposed (Bókkon, 2008) that the phosphene phenomenon is due to the intrinsic perception of induced (mechanical, electrical, magnetic, etc.) or spontaneous increased bioluminescent biophoton emission of cells in various parts of the retinotopic visual system. Induced or spontaneous unregulated overproduction of free radicals and energetically excited molecules can create a brief increase of the generation of bioluminescent biophotons in the visual system. When this excess biophoton emission can exceed a threshold, they appear as phosphene lights in the subject’s mind.


My hypothesis that phosphene lights are due to the excess biophotons is supported by several sets of experiments. Catala (2006) has shown that radicals from lipid peroxidation of the photoreceptors can create (bio)chemiluminescent photons (bioluminescence is a type of chemiluminescence, which naturally occurs in living organisms) in the visual spectrum. Subsequently, our prediction regarding one specific kind of phosphenes (i.e. retinal phosphenes during space travel) was supported by Narici et al. (2009). According to this latter work, ionizing radiation (cosmic particle rays) induced free radicals which produce chemiluminescent photons through processes including by lipid peroxidation. Chemiluminescent photons are then absorbed by the photoreceptors and initiate a photo-transduction cascade, which results in the perception of phosphenes. Narici et al. (2012) also revealed that the lipid peroxidation of the photoreceptors can produce (bio)chemiluminescent photons that generate anomalous visual effects, such as those associated with retinal phosphenes. Recently, the first experimental in vitro evidence was presented (Wang, Bókkon et al., 2011) for the existence of spontaneous and visible light induced biophoton emission from freshly isolated whole eye, lens, vitreous humor and retina samples from rats. It also supports the hypothesis that phosphene lights are produced by biophotons.

Since phosphenes can be produced by direct stimulation of the visual cortex without a retinal photo-transduction cascade, this suggests that retinal and visual cortical phosphenes are generated by similar (bio)chemiluminescent photons, and both may due to the transiently and locally increased ultraweak biophotons. Namely, because retinal and cortical phosphenes can be produced by similar (bio)chemiluminescent photons, if it can be demonstrated in the future that perception of cortical induced phosphenes (in V1 and V2 areas) is due to biophotons, regulated biophotons in early retinotopic neurons could act as natural biophysical substrates of visual perception and imagery. Thus, phosphene phenomenon helps prove my biophysical picture representation (virtual biophysical picture reality in the V1, internally generated virtual biophysical picture perception).
I do not claim to solve the secret of consciousness, but propose that the evolution in the higher levels of complexity made possible the emergence of intrinsic picture representation of the external visual world by regulated redox and bioluminescent biophotons in the visual system during visual perception and visual imagery. It is remarkable that evolution of higher levels of complexity making intrinsic biophysical picture representation of the external visual world is possible.

References
1. Bókkon I, Salari V, Scholkmann F, Dai J, Grass F. (2013) Interdisciplinary implications on autism, savantism, Asperger syndrome and the biophysical picture representation: Thinking in pictures. Cognitive Systems Research 22–23, 67–77.
2. Bókkon I, Mallick BN. (2012) Activation of retinotopic areas is central to REM sleep associated dreams: Visual dreams and visual imagery possibly co-emerged in evolution. Activitas Nervosa Superior 54, 10-25.
3. Bókkon I, Salari V. (2012) Brilliant lights by bioluminescent photons in near-death experiences. Medical Hypotheses 79, 47-49.
4. Bókkon I, Vimal RLP, Wang C, Dai J, Salari V, Grass F, Antal I. (2011) Visible light induced ocular delayed bioluminescence as a possible origin of negative afterimage. J. Photochem. Photobiol. B Biology. 103, 192–199.
5. Wang C, Bókkon I, Dai J, Antal I. (2011) First experimental demonstration of spontaneous and visible light-induced photon emission from rat eyes. Brain Res. 1369. 1-9.
6. Bókkon I, Salari V, Tuszynski J. (2011) Emergence of intrinsic representations of images by feedforward and feedback processes and bioluminescent photons in early retinotopic areas (Toward biophysical homunculus by an iterative model). J Integr Neurosci. 10, 47-64.
7. Bókkon I, Antal I. (2011) Schizophrenia: redox regulation and volume transmission. Current Neuropharmacology 9, 289-300.
8. Bókkon I, Salari V, Tuszynski J, Antal I. (2010) Estimation of the number of biophotons involved in the visual perception of a single-object image: Biophoton intensity can be considerably higher inside cells than outside J. Photochem. Photobiol. B Biology 100, 160-166.
9. Bókkon I, Vimal RLP. (2010). Implications on visual apperception: energy, duration, structure and synchronization. BioSystems 101, 1-9.
10. Bókkon I, Dai J, Antal I. (2010) Picture representation during REM dreams: A redox molecular hypothesis. BioSystems. 100, 79-86.
11. Bókkon I, Vimal RLP. (2009) Retinal phosphenes and discrete dark noises in rods: a new biophysical framework. J. Photochem. Photobiol. B Biology. 96, 255-259.
12. Bókkon I. (2009) Visual perception and imagery: a new hypothesis. BioSystems 96, 178-184.
13. Bókkon I, D'Angiulli A. (2009) Emergence and transmission of visual awareness through optical coding in the brain: A redox molecular hypothesis on visual mental imagery. Bioscience Hypotheses 2, 226-232.
14. Bókkon I. (2008) Phosphene phenomenon: a new concept. BioSystems 92, 168-174.
15. Bókkon I. Mallick B.N. Tuszynski J.A. (2013) Near death experiences and bioluminescent biophotons: A multidisciplinary hypothesis. Invited paper Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Research Topic: Non-Ordinary Mental Expressions. Submitted.
16. Dotta BT, Buckner CA, Lafrenie RM, Persinger MA. Photon emissions from human brain and cell culture exposed to distally rotating magnetic fields shared by separate light-stimulated brains and cells. Brain Res. 2011 May 4;1388:77-88.
17. Dotta BT, Buckner CA, Cameron D, Lafrenie RF, Persinger MA. Biophoton emissions from cell cultures: biochemical evidence for the plasma membrane as the primary source. Gen Physiol Biophys. 2011 Sep;30(3):301-9.
18. Dotta BT, Saroka KS, Persinger MA. Increased photon emission from the head while imagining light in the dark is correlated with changes in electroencephalographic power: support for Bókkon's biophoton hypothesis. Neurosci Lett. 2012 Apr 4;513(2):151-4

Extra Sensory: The Science and Pseudoscience of Telepathy and Other Powers of the Mind

Extra Sensory is a pop-science look at the untapped abilities of human beings, from ESP to Telekenesis and other real life sciences that are currently being studied today, from physicist Brian Clegg.

We'd all love to have 'psi' abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and remote viewing. But is there any solid evidence to back up these talents, or are they nothing more than fantasy? We still only understand a small percentage of the capabilities of the human brain—and we shouldn’t dismiss such potential powers out of hand. Although there is no doubt that many who claim these abilities are frauds, and no one has yet won James Randi’s $1M prize for demonstrating ESP under lab conditions, we still have a Nobel prize winner suggesting a mechanism for telepathy, serious scientists researching the field and university projects that produced potentially explosive results. What’s the verdict? By looking at possible physical mechanisms for ESP and taking in the best scientific evidence, the reader can discover if this is all wishful thinking and deception, or a fascinating reality. The truth is out there.

Biography

Brian's most recent book is Gravity He has written eleven other science titles, including the bestselling Inflight Science, The God Effect, Before the Big Bang, Ecologic, A Brief History of Infinity and Build Your Own Time Machine.

Along with appearances at the Royal Institution in London he has spoken at venues from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Cheltenham Festival of Science, has contributed to radio and TV programmes, and is a popular speaker at schools. Brian is also editor of the successful www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Brian has Masters degrees from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences and from Lancaster University in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to apply the power of mathematics to warfare. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.

Brian has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous publications, including Nature, The Guardian, PC Week, Computer Weekly, Personal Computer World, Innovative Leader, Professional Manager, BBC History, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful. His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Thai and even Indonesian.

Web Source  Amazon

Death and Afterwards

 

	Book review on Is there life after death? The extraordinary science of what happens when we die by Anthony Peake (2006) Reviewed by David Fontana, 2010 published in Network Review No 104
	(order this book from amazon.co.uk)

This book has a rather similar title and cover illustration to my Is There an Afterlife?, and appeared shortly after its publication, so naturally I was interested in seeing if it bore similarity in other ways to Is There an Afterlife?.  The answer is no.  The similarity begins and ends with the title and the cover, and Anthony Peake's book takes a very different view of the evidence for survival from my own.   Peake does not reject the reality of survival or criticise the kind of approach that I and others have used, but as Professor Bruce Greyson explains in his Foreword, his approach presents us with a quite different 'astounding and provocative' model for understanding the nature of death and of what happens subsequently.  In essence the model is not in fact entirely new, but it has been re-worked by Peake within the context of modern theories from quantum physics, neuropsychiatry, and clinical psychiatry.
Briefly - and I hope that I don't over-simplify - Peake proposes that after death we immediately begin our lives over again, and do so repeatedly after each subsequent death.  In each of these lifetimes, consciousness is split between a lower self that experiences physical existence, and a higher self that retains all memories of our various lifetimes but that, beyond offering occasional flashes of illumination and guidance, remains inaccessible to lower-self consciousness.  In addition to the evidence provided by these sudden illuminations, Peake refers for support to the various interpretations of reality provided by quantum physics, in particular those interpretations that relate to the role and importance of the observer, arguing that the physical universe surrounding each observer is personal to the individual, and dependent upon his or her perception of it.  When people die, they are simply dying in and to the universe of each of those observing them, but not to their own universe.  Their existence continues in their personal universe, and they proceed to re-live their life in what for them is real time.  The memories stored in the higher self enable the individual to re-experience his or her whole lifetime over again, though this time with the ability to make changes in it.
At this distance I couldn't give the references, but I first came across this intriguing theory in my studies of ancient mystery traditions very many years ago, but never found any answers to the questions it raises.  For example, if each of us inhabits our personal universe, then what position do you occupy in my universe, and what position do I occupy in yours?  And how is it that familiar individuals can relate to me over and over again as I repeat my lifetimes?  Are they merely reflections of their real selves?  Or do their various universes intermingle with mine, in which case we each live partly in the multitude of universes that surround us, and each individual's universe is therefore not after all personal to him or herself?
Peake's answer to these and related questions involves David Bohm's theory of the implicate/explicate order.  In terms of the relevant parts of the theory, the implicate order can be thought of as a giant, flowing hologram containing every region of time and space.  Like a hologram, the implicate order enfolds all reality.  And like a hologram, each part of this implicate order contains a miniature copy of the whole, including presumably the lives of each one of us.  The explicate order, the material reality in which we live, is a projection of the implicate order, and the apparent stability and solidity we experience around us is generated and sustained by a ceaseless transition of sub-atomic particles between enfoldment (the implicate order) and unfoldment (the explicate order).  The sub-atomic particles that make up the explicate order of our material reality are in fact constantly dissolving into the implicate order and then recrystallising and re-emerging into the explicate order.  In terms of our conscious existence, each individual inhabits his or her own universe at the level of the explicit order, but meshes and intermeshes with everyone else's individual universe at that of the implicate level.  At so-called death, the individual and his or her personal universe leaves the explicit universes of those at the bedside, only to re-emerge in its own universe and re-live its life.
There are elegant mathematical models that support Bohm, despite the fact that his theory goes contrary to the more generally accepted Copenhagan interpretation of quantum physics, but my main objection to Peake's use of it in support of his own model of death and dying is that his model does not represent the picture of death and dying that we receive through spirit communications transmitted through mediums, or through the picture we are given by Out of the Body and Near Death Experiences and Deathbed Visions of the next world.  A voluminous body of evidence has grown up concerning death and the afterlife since the Society for Psychical Research began its attempts to investigate survival in 1882, and virtually none of this evidence to my knowledge directly supports Peake's model.  Spirit communicators speak of levels of afterlife existence distinct from physical reality, full of experiences never encountered while in earth, and with opportunities for development towards more exalted levels of understanding.
Apart from Near Death Experiences (NDEs), Anthony Peake makes no mention of this evidence, and even regards NDEs as 'an error, a glitch in the system', occasioned by the fact the body is preparing 'itself for death by giving the person' positive rather than negative experiences.  He suggests further that it is the publicity given to NDEs and the expectations to which this publicity gives rise, that determines the form and content of the typical NDE.  In addition, he claims that 'it is usual that the approach to death is made in a cloud of painkilling drugs', and perhaps with an 'initial flood of chemicals in the brain'.  This claim ignores the fact that neuropsychiatrist Dr. Peter Fenwick in particular has pointed out, supported by a large data bank of case studies, that many of those reporting NDEs had no prior knowledge that NDEs even exist, thus ruling out the possibility that expectations play any part in their experiences.  Furthermore, in one of the most carefully reasoned and detailed analyses of the medical influences upon the brain and the NDE, Dr. Fenwick has shown that NDEs cannot be attributed to painkilling drugs or to a flood of brain chemicals, or to any of the other natural explanations that have been so diligently advanced in an attempt to dispose of NDE evidence.
If I appear over-critical of Anthony Peake's book, let me protest this is not my intention.  In one short review it is impossible to do justice to its richness.  Peake presents his theory carefully and with internal consistency, and the book is a mine of information on quantum theory, and on relevant areas of philosophy.  He is also careful to point out that he does 'not intend his theory to invalidate long-held religious beliefs about life after death'.  I welcome his attempt to present an alternative theory of what happens at death (just as I welcome the other work he does in support of psychical research), and the clarity and lucidity with which he describes his theory.  The more we advance carefully argued alternative models of what happens at death and beyond the better.  My point is simply that I think the evidence we have on dying and the afterlife supports a very different model from the one he proposes.    Doubtless he will disagree, and in the final analysis those interesting themselves in death and dying must familiarise themselves with as much of the evidence as they can, and then arrive at their own conclusions.
References:
Fenwick, P. and Fenwick, E. (1995).  The Truth in the Light.  London: Headline.
Fenwick, P. (2008).  The Art of Dying.  London: Continuum.
  



The Scientific and Medical Network

Psychic Exploration

A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousness

by Edgar D. Mitchell, ScD

Psychic Exploration, A Challenge for Science is a primer on psychic research, life's purpose, and the meaning of the universe. Originally published in 1974, this landmark anthology of nearly thirty chapters on every area of psychic research is finally available again. Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and moonwalker, as well as a distinguished researcher of the study of human consciousness, brought together eminent scientists to write about issues once considered too controversial to discuss. This book includes fascinating chapters on the history of parapsychology, telepathy, hauntings, psychic phenomena, and consciousness, along with an extensive glossary and index. This timeless anthology continues to be appealing as a reference work for those curious about the history of parapsychology, fans of the world of psi, and readers interested in the meaning of the universe. Contributors include: Willis W. Harman, Jean Houston, Stanley Krippner, Robert Masters, William G. Roll, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, Montague Ullman, and many more.


Ref Institute of Noetic Science