Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Rationale

The subject matter of most of this book is so controversial that I have felt it necessary to give detailed references to all my sources of information. These appear as numbers in the text, which refer to the bibliography. Most are papers published in reputable journals, and where I have myself not been able to check the findings, I have had to rely on the fact that most editors send material to expert referees before accepting it for final publication. Wherever possible, I have consulted the original source material and found that this paid huge dividends. A report in Scientific American of March 1965, for instance, under the title 'Eyeless Vision Unmasked', claimed that Rosa Kuleshova was a fraud and that 'peeking is easy, according to those who understand mentalist acts'.

Several books since that time have used this report as justification for dismissing the entire phenomenon, but reference to the original research shows that, despite the fact that she was once caught cheating very clumsily at a public performance, Kuleshova also possesses a talent that cannot reasonably be shrugged off in this cavalier fashion. I make no apology for heavy reliance at many points on publications such as the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and the Journal of Parapsychology - they set standards of erudition and objectivity as high as any other academic publications.

Where no reference appears, the flights of fancy are my own.

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