In the biggest change since the attacks of September 11, 2001 drastically increased airport security around the US, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced that airline passengers can now keep their shoes on while passing through TSA checkpoints.
The change, which was issued by memo to TSA agents last week and reported on by CBS News Monday, allows all airline passengers in the regular TSA lines at airports — not just Pre-Check — to keep shoes on when going through checkpoints. The policy shift will roll out in phases, but it’s already taken effect at San Francisco International Airport as of Tuesday, per the Chronicle.
Other airports on the first-phase list include Baltimore/Washington International Airport, Fort Lauderdale International Airport, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Portland International Airport, Philadelphia International Airport, and Piedmont Triad International Airport in North Carolina. And CBS News reported the shoe rule had lifted at LAX and New York’s LaGuardia Airport as well. The goal is to have the policy change at all airports soon.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt retweeted the CBS News report on Tuesday morning, but offered no further explanation.
According to Homeland Security, footwear can remain on unless it sets off alarms at scanners or magnetometers, in which case it will need to be removed for further scanning. A statement from HSA said, “We are always exploring new and innovative ways to enhance the passenger experience and our strong security posture.”
As some of us may remember, the practice of taking off shoes at airports began in 2006, a full five years after the thwarted terrorist incident that inspired it. And that incident didn’t even involve a passenger going through security in the US.
Three months after the 9/11 attacks, on December 22, 2001, London-born petty criminal Richard Reid, who had become radicalized and received terrorist training in Pakistan, boarded American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami. In the middle of the flight, Reid began trying to light the fuse on one of his shoes, which was packed with explosives, in an attempted suicide bombing — but the fuse failed to light. Passengers subdued him, the plane made an emergency landing in Boston, and Reid was arrested. He remains in federal prison serving a life sentence.
It’s not clear what technology now exists to detect a similar “shoe bomb,” except maybe the full-body scanners, which most major airports now use.
It’s been the practice at SFO and elsewhere, at least on busier travel days in the last two years, to streamline the security process by using bomb-sniffing dogs in the TSA lines — you may have done the two-by-two walks past them — and then allowing travelers to keep electronics and liquids in their bags before sending them through the scanners. Occasionally this was combined with a lifting of the shoe-removal policy.
And even though Reid had been on an international flight into the US, the shoe-removal practice was very much an America-only thing. Flights out of Europe, Asia, and Canada generally have never required this, except for a brief period two decades ago when Europe followed suit with the US.
Top image: Travelers go through the TSA PreCheck security point at Miami International Airport on June 2, 2016 in Miami, Florida. As the busy summer travel season heats up the Transportation Security Administration is encouraging people to sign up for the TSA PreCheck program to save time going through the airports security lines. Those enrolled in the program can leave their shoes, light outerwear and belt on during the terminal screening process as well as keeping their laptop in the carry-on suitcase without having to remove them at the checkpoint. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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For thousands of years, spiritual traditions have taught that consciousness—the soul—is not confined to the body. It transcends space and time, continues after death, and connects us to something greater. Science, for most of its modern era, has rejected this view. The brain, we were told, is a meat computer. Mind is its software. When the brain dies, the story ends.
But something remarkable is happening.
Across neuroscience, physics, and consciousness research, cracks are beginning to appear in the old paradigm. A new vision is emerging—one that suggests the soul may be more than metaphor. That consciousness may not reside inside the brain, but may be a field that the brain tunes into.
In short: you are not your brain. You are the signal. The brain is just the receiver.
The Brain as a Transceiver
Mainstream neuroscience has long operated on the assumption that consciousness is an “emergent property” of complex brain activity. But this view has never been able to answer the hard problem of consciousness: How does matter produce subjective experience? How does electrochemical activity lead to love, music, memory, or awe?
Some researchers are challenging that very premise. Sir Roger Penrose, a physicist, and Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, proposed a theory called Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction), which suggests that quantum processes within microtubules—structures inside brain neurons—may be the seat of consciousness.
Quantum processes don’t obey classical physics. They can be nonlocal, indeterminate, and even timeless. This raises a profound possibility: consciousness may not be generated by the brain, but may exist independently, with the brain acting more like a radio than a generator. Just as a damaged radio cannot play music well but does not destroy the station itself, a damaged brain may impair consciousness but not end it.
This would explain why some people in deep comas or with little cortical activity still report vivid experiences—and why some individuals return from clinical death with memories, visions, and perceptions impossible to attribute to brain function.
The Evidence We Ignore
Near-death experiences (NDEs), often dismissed by materialist science, provide astonishing examples of consciousness seemingly operating outside the body. People blind from birth report vivid visual experiences. Others accurately describe scenes from operating rooms during cardiac arrest—moments when brain activity was flatlined.
Studies by Dr. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, found that roughly 18% of cardiac arrest survivors reported verifiable NDEs, many with details they could not have observed by normal sensory means. His conclusion: consciousness can exist independently of the brain.
Similarly, experiments in remote viewing and telepathy—some conducted under U.S. government programs like Stargate—suggest that information can be accessed at a distance without conventional sensory input. The implications are staggering. If consciousness can perceive without the brain, then what is the brain?
The Field Model of Mind
One increasingly compelling model views consciousness as a field—an informational or energetic structure existing in space-time, perhaps embedded in what physicists call the zero-point field or vacuum energy. This is the quantum background of reality, a seething sea of potential from which all particles arise.
In spiritual language, we might call it the Akashic Field, the Divine Mind, or the Logos. It’s not just poetic. It may be ontologically real.
Rupert Sheldrake, a British biologist, proposes a similar idea with his theory of morphic resonance—that there is a field associated with all self-organizing systems that stores memory and form. According to this view, your consciousness is not in your body any more than a website is inside your laptop. Your body accesses it, but it doesn’t create it.
When you remember, dream, or intuit, you may be syncing with this larger, shared field. The soul, then, is your personal node in a greater cosmic web.
Tuning the Frequency
If the brain is a receiver, then states of consciousness may correspond to frequencies. Meditation, prayer, psychedelics, and near-death experiences all shift brainwaves—into alpha, theta, and delta states. Each of these states may allow the mind to tune into different layers of the field.
Indigenous traditions around the world speak of “vision quests,” “spirit journeys,” or “astral travel.” These are not primitive superstitions. They are techniques for altering consciousness in order to access nonlocal information. They are spiritual technologies.
Jesus going into the wilderness. The shamans of the Amazon drinking ayahuasca. The Christian mystics fasting and entering ecstatic trance. The practices may differ—but the goal is the same: to enter the signal more clearly.
If This Is True…
If consciousness is not in the brain, but is nonlocal, eternal, and participatory—then everything changes.
It means death is not an end but a transition. It means intuition may be a valid way of knowing. It means prayer might actually transmit energy. It means our minds are not isolated but entangled.
It also means our every thought, every intention, every act of love or cruelty is recorded—not by a judging deity on a throne, but in the field itself. What you are becoming echoes through the structure of the cosmos.
And if consciousness is primary—if, as Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental”—then matter arises from mind, not the other way around. This is the core of all mystical traditions: reality is made of Spirit.
The Scientific Resistance
This vision terrifies the materialist establishment. It threatens power structures, scientific orthodoxy, and religious literalism alike. If consciousness is nonlocal, then it cannot be owned, controlled, or reduced to algorithms.
It cannot be bought or sold. It cannot be locked in a lab.
But the data continues to pile up, and the veil continues to thin.
Quantum physics, near-death studies, parapsychology, and spiritual experience all point in the same direction: that the universe is conscious, and you are a part of its awareness.
A Final Thought
You are not a brain carrying a soul.
You are a soul using a brain—tuning into a deeper field of meaning, memory, and mystery.
To live as if this were true is to live awake. To pray, meditate, forgive, and love not as moral duties but as spiritual technologies. To remember that your signal is unique. And that, somewhere beyond time, it never dies.
LUCID DREAMING Saturday, July 12, 2025, 10:00 AM to 3:00 P.M. Pacific Presented on ZoomWe’re all swimming in our subconscious mind when we dream. With Lucid Dreaming, we bring the conscious mind to be aware that we’re dreaming (while we’re in the subconscious mind) and amazing things can happen. Come to class and learn the process of becoming a Lucid Dreamer.
Lucid Dreaming will help to Release the Power of your Dreams • Accelerate your Personal Growth • Understand the route to your conscious evolution • Solve Problems • Realize those “not so secret” messages in your unconscious mind. • Gain ideas to help in waking life • Turn up your creativity • Learn to interpret your dreams • Practice methods to remember dreams • Review of the Latest scientific information on sleep, dreaming and health
What you’ll receive with the Class • 5 hour class delivered via an online webinar. • Class Notes and resource Links • Workshop • Invitation to the weekly Dream Group • Dream interpretation session with HughJohn Please Register with Button Below – Fees: $75 First Time $25 ReviewAfter registering you will be sent a Zoom meeting link to join on the day before class.Email me, HughJohn.Malanaphy@TheProsperos.org with any questions you have and I’ll be looking forward to having you in class.Register Here
Saying “I love you” often feels more meaningful in your first language than in any other language you learn later in life, explains linguist and polyglot Magdalena Hoeller. Unpacking the hidden challenges of intercultural relationships — from language barriers and humor gaps to subtle power dynamics — she shares how couples can turn these struggles into opportunities to grow closer.
Before the Orlando Pulse massacre, the deadliest attack on LGBTQ people in U.S. history was an arson fire at the UpStairs Lounge, a gay bar in New Orleans. The fire killed 32 people on June 24, 1973.
It is enlightening the re-examine the UpStairs Lounge fire in the wake of the Orlando shooting that killed 49 people at the Pulse gay bar in Florida on June 12, 2016.
Few people cared about the UpStairs Lounge fire at the time. The crime was never solved, churches refused to do funerals for the dead, and four bodies went unclaimed. Now there is a resurgence of interest in the martyrs of New Orleans.
“Upstairs Inferno,” a documentary directed by Robert Camina and narrated by Christopher Rice, was released on DVD in 2018 and is also available for streaming. The film brings humanity to the headlines by interviewing more than 20 people, including several survivors who have kept silent for decades. It was an official selection of 40 film festivals around the world. It won 20 awards, including 12 jury awards and 4 audience awards.
The fire is also remembered in the 2016 book “Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation” by Harvard history professor Jim Downs. The first chapter, titled “The Largest Massacre of Gay People in American History,” is about the UpStairs Lounge fire. “One of my goals in this book has been to shift the focus of discussion of gay culture from sex to religion, and from intimacy to community,” he writes.
For queer people, the UpStairs Lounge served as a sanctuary in every sense of the world. It was a seemingly safe place where LGBTQ people met behind boarded-up windows that hid them from a hostile world. Worship services were held there by the LGBT-affirming Metropolitan Community Church of New Orleans. The pastor, Rev. William R. Larson, died along with a third of congregation. Half the victims were MCC members. Those who died included people from all walks of life: preachers, hustlers, soldiers, musicians, parents, professionals and a mother with her two sons.
Reginald “Reggie” Adams, the only black victim, was in the Jesuit formation process to become a Catholic priest and also a member of Metropolitan Community Churches when his young life ended tragically in the fire at age 22. He was in a relationship with Regina, who identifies as a transgender woman today. Adams’ little-known story is uncovered in a major article and reflection, both by journalist Robert Fieseler.
The horror of the fire was compounded by the homophobic reactions. Most churches refused to hold funerals for the victims. When Rev. William P. Richardson of St. George’s Episcopal Church agreed to hold a small prayer service for the victims on June 25, he was rebuked by his bishop and flooded with hate mail for his courageous act of kindness. Two memorial services were led by clergy from out of state on July 1: MCC founder Rev. Troy Perry flew to New Orleans to conduct a group memorial service at a Unitarian Church. And Rev. Finis Crutchfield, the Methodist bishop from Louisiana, led a service at St. Mark’s United Methodist Church.
Families of four victims were apparently so ashamed of their gay relatives that they would not identify or claim their remains. The City refused to release their bodies to MCC for burial, and instead laid them to rest in a mass grave at a potter’s field.
The full-length feature documentary “Upstairs Inferno” was produced and directed by Camina, whose previous film was the widely praised “Raid of the Rainbow Lounge” about a police raid at a Texas gay bar. Now he has created the most comprehensive and authoritative film on America’s biggest gay mass murder. Survivors interviewed in the film include Ricky Everett and Francis Dufrene and a survivor who lost her lover Reggie Adams in the blaze.
Narrator Chrisopher Rice is an openly gay New York Times bestselling author whose hometown is New Orleans. His debut novel “A Density of Souls” got a landslide of media attention, mostly because he is the son of famed vampire author Anne Rice.
Two videos trailers for the film have been released. The first trailer provides an overview while the second trailer present additional interviews about the personal impact of the fire.
Meanwhile a different film crew working on “Tracking Fire” discovered vandalism on the memorial plaque while filming an interview there in May 2015. Someone through a paint bomb at the plaque, leaving it discolored even after the paint was cleaned off.
A sidewalk memorial plaque outside the UpStairs Lounge building in New Orleans was dedicated in 2003 and vandalized in 2015 (photo courtesy of “Tracking Fire“)
Another documentary still in production is “Tracking Fire” with director Sheri Wright. A video trailer is posted. “My focus is to tell the story of what happened, honor the victims, including the mother who died with her two sons, the survivors, their friends and family. It is also my intention to present a way for healing to replace the pain of tragedy and to offer a healthy resolution for personal and social conflict,” the film’s website explains.
Announcing the full-length trailer for Tracking Fire, a documentary which chronicles an unsolved case of arson that claimed 32 lives – one of the worst tragedies in LGBT history in America. Posted by Tracking Fire on Monday, March 24, 2014
LGBT Religious Archives created an online exhibit about the UpStairs Lounge Fire with more than 120 artifacts that weave together stories about the fire and its aftermath, early gay activism, and the beginnings of Metropolitan Community Church in New Orleans. Original artifacts include newspaper and journal articles, photographs, correspondence, government reports and recordings from the time. The exhibit went online in September 2013 and received the 2014 Allan Bérubé Prize for “outstanding work in public or community-based LGBT and/or queer history.”
The crime received little attention from police, elected officials and news media. The only national TV news coverage at the time was these video clips from CBS and NBC:
Louisiana playwright and composer Wayne Self spent five years weaving together the stories of the UpStairs Lounge fire victims and survivors. The result was the dramatic musical “Upstairs,” which has been performed in various cities in Louisiana, New York and California after opening in New Orleans and Los Angeles in June 2013. He says his work takes the form “of tribute, of memorial, even of hagiography.”
The musical “Upstairs” brings back to life people such as MCC assistant pastor George “Mitch” Mitchell, who managed to escape the fire, but ran back into the burning building to save his boyfriend, Louis Broussard. Both men died in the fire. Their bodies were found clinging to one another in the ashes. In the musical, Mitchell sings a song called “I’ll Always Return”:
…Modern age, Life to wage. To get ahead, must turn the page. I can’t promise I’ll never leave, But I’ll always, I’ll always return….
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2850803018/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/notracklist=true/t=4/transparent=true/ “I’ll Always Return” is one of five songs from the musical that are available online as workshop selection at http://upstairsmusical.bandcamp.com/.
Self raised funds so that Mitchell’s son and the son’s wife and could travel from Alabama to attend the play. Many victims of the UpStairs Lounge fire were survived by children who are still alive today.
The musical also explores the unsettled and unsettling question of who set the fire. Rodger Dale Nunez, a hustler and UpStairs Lounge customer, was arrested for the crime, but escaped and was never sentenced. He was thrown out of the UpStairs Lounge shortly before the fire for starting a fight with a fellow hustler. He committed suicide a year later. Self says that other theories arose to blame the KKK and the police, but he implicates Nunez — with room for doubt — in the musical.
A gay man may have lit the fire, but the real culprit is still society’s homophobia that set the fuse inside him. Hatred for LGBT people was also responsible for the high death toll in another way. The fire was especially deadly because the windows were covered with iron bars and boards so nobody could see who was inside. But they also prevented many people from getting outside in an emergency.
The UpStairs Lounge is recreated with haunting detail in Skylar Fein’s 90-piece art installation. He builds an environment with artifacts, photos, video, and a reproduction of the bar’s swinging-door entrance, evoking memories of how the place looked before and after the fire. “Remember the UpStairs Lounge” debuted in New Orleans in 2008 and was shown in New York in 2010. In January 2013 the New Orleans Museum of Art announced that it had acquired the installation. Fein donated it to the museum, saying that he did not want to dismantle the work or profit from its sale.
The victims of the UpStairs Lounge fire are part of LGBTQ history now, along with the queer martyrs who were burned at the stake for sodomy in medieval times. Their history is told in my previous post Ash Wednesday: Queer martyrs rise from the ashes.
The UpStairs Lounge fire gives new meaning to the Upper Room where Jesus and his disciples shared a Last Supper. It was also the place where they hid after his crucifixion, but the locked doors did not prevent the risen Christ from joining them and empowering them with the Holy Spirit.
The shared journey of LGBTQ people includes much loss — from hate crimes, suicide, AIDS, and government persecution. But the LGBT community has also found ways to keep going. Reginald, one of the survivors of the UpStairs Lounge fire, expresses this strength in the song “Carry On” from the “Upstairs” musical:
I can speak. I can teach. I can give of the compassion I’ve received. I can build. I can sing! I can honor all the loves, That have passed away from me, By sharing all the good that they have ever shown to me. I can live my life. I can carry on. Carry on. Carry on!
New Orleans film maker Royd Anderson’s “The UpStairs Lounge Fire” documentary lasts 27 minutes (longer than the fire itself) and includes interviews with an eyewitness, a son who lost his father, a rookie firefighter called to the scene, author Johnny Townsend, and artist Skylar Fein, whose art exhibit about the tragedy gained national prominence. Here is a video trailer for the documentary.
The value of remembering the UpStairs Lounge fire was summed up by Lynn Jordan in the LGBT Religious Archives online exhibit that he co-curated. Jordan, founding member of MCC San Francisco, visited New Orleans shortly before and after the fire. In his introduction to the UpStairs exhibit, he explains:
“I left New Orleans with the promise to each of the 32 who would become immortal, that I would remember their sacrifice and carry them with me in all that would unfold in my life. The research and documentation that is an integral part of this Upstairs exhibit is “my” living into completion the promise to these “32 martyrs of the flames” that they “would not” be forgotten.
For those who would say that this event was so yesterday, i.e., we have achieved so many advances in our civil rights and in our acceptance for this to happen again, I would remind them that hate and intolerance are not constrained to finding shelter in any one moment, any one location in our “queer” history. To focus only on how far our LGBTQI communities may have progressed in 40 years; to fail to remember the sacrifice of all the lives lost or shattered in this journey; to lapse into complacency about our personal security: places us at risk of reviving the tragedy of our past in the present.”
Other acts of violence and harassment at LGBTQ bars
The UpStairs Lounge fire was the deadliest U.S. attack on LGBTQ people until it was surpassed by the Orlando shooting that killed 49 people at the Pulse gay bar in Florida on June 12, 2016.
Both of these mass murders came during LGBT Pride Month, which marks the 1969 Stonewall rebellion at another gay bar: the Stonewall Inn in New York City.
A domestic terrorist bombed of the Otherside Lounge lesbian bar in Atlanta, Georgia, on Feb. 21, 1997. He targeted the bar because he opposed LGBTQ rights. Five people were injured, the building was damaged, and several cars in the parking lot were destroyed.
Martyrs are those killed for a cause. May the souls of those killed in New Orleans and Orlando be welcomed to heaven by the LGBTQ saints and by history’s many queer martyrs who were killed for their sexual orientation or gender expression.
____ Top image credit: “See You at the UpStairs Lounge” by Skylar Fein
___ This post is part of the LGBTQ Calendar series by Kittredge Cherry. The series celebrates religious and spiritual holidays, events in LGBT and queer history, holy days, feast days, festivals, anniversaries, liturgical seasons and other occasions of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people of faith and our allies.
This article was originally published in June 2017, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on June 23, 2025.
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
The Lord of Debauch is one of those warning cards that we must always take seriously when we come under his influence. Without fail, when he appears we must expect to be subjected to some kind of temptation or test. We must be on our guard for making the exact mistake that he tells us is possible.Temptations come in many shapes and forms, don’t they? Some of these are minor, and others much more serious. The Seven of Cups deals primarily with sensual pleasures… sex, food, money, status.Sometimes, the card indicates that we are surrounded by a multitude of different pleasures, and cannot quite make our minds up which ones to choose, out of the many available to us. In so doing, we miss the boat altogether and end up with nothing. Or, alternatively, we greedily snatch at everything we see, possibly missing the real treasure that is waiting for us to notice it.Greed, triviality, surrender of moral ethics are the big problems when this card appears. We must guard firmly against any of these things, holding hard to our sense of love and goodness.On a day ruled by this card, you need to keep a sharp eye open for all of the above. Also try to monitor your reactions and responses to others – another way we can give in to the Lord of Debauch is to treat another human being in a way we wouldn’t wish to be treated ourselves.If your irritability quotient goes up, spend some time with yourself working out why, and then deal with it. That way you won’t snap the heads off the people you love. If you feel impatient and frustrated, again, work out why… then go and satisfy yourself.On the high spiritual level, this is a day where forgetting what you believe in will accrue some debt unnecessarily. Be alert for tests of your belief, strong in your love, and bright in your life. That way you should pass the test!!
Affirmation: “I am strong in love and bright in life. I shine with the radiance of a star.”
In recent years, interest in astrology has been on the rise. Many of us eagerly wait for the daily horoscope or chalk up certain personality traits to our signs. We’ve wondered: is our fate determined by celestial bodies, or are we wandering stars traversing the cosmos, fashioning our destiny as we go along? The fact that such conversations have entered our modern lexicon is largely due to the meteoric rise of one woman: Evangeline Adams, who happened to hail from Jersey City. Read on to learn about Jersey City’s Evangeline Adams and her impact on modern-day American astrology.
Who Was Evangeline Adams?
Evangeline Adams has been called the godmother of modern astrology. Before her, only 20 people in America could calculate a birth chart (none of them American) — after Evangeline, thousands were familiar and interested in astrology.
At her height, she read horoscopes and counseled the greatest elites of her time: King Edward VII of Britain, J.P. Morgan, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene O’Neill, Joseph Campbell, the head of the New York Stock Exchange (Seymour Cromwell), and Hollywood starlets such as Tallulah Bankhead and Lillian Russell. It was J.P. Morgan who famously said, “Millionaires don’t need astrologers, but billionaires do.”
For nearly 3,000 years — since the days of ancient Babylon — astrology had been dominated by men, but after Evangeline Adams, women had taken the throne.
If the planetary alignments are so significant to our future, then perhaps Evangeline’s birth in Jersey City on February 8th, 1868 (at exactly 8:36AM) divined her life, setting the course for a woman who would alter the American understanding of astrology forever.
Evangeline was born an Aquarius, sometimes characterized as rebelliously independent and one who despises authority. Or, to put it in Evangeline’s (humble) words from her 1931 publication Astrology for Everyone: “Men and women born strongly under the influence of [Aquarius] live for humanity. They pour themselves out on the world. And they reap the reward which the world gives to such people — fame.”
Looking at Evangeline’s life, it’s hard to refute such a claim. Evangeline was born of meager means at 5 Exchange Place in a building which has since been demolished to make way for the present building, built in 1920 — now the Hyatt House at 1 Exchange Place.
At the time, “Exchange Place” was merely a location between the railway and docks, a slum so neglected, Jersey City left it off the map until 1891. Interestingly, the Hyatt House still stands between the train tracks of the Light Rail and the waterfront. This building is also currently home to the RoofTop at Exchange Place, which just reopened for the spring on May 12th. Evangeline’s father died when she was only 15 months old, and the family moved to Massachusetts, where at a young age, she had to provide for her mother.
Evangeline became engaged to her employer, but broke off the engagement — which was utterly scandalous at the time. When she decided to settle in New York, the Fifth Avenue Hotel where her family had visited for generations refused her entry for practicing astrology. But her initial fame arose in 1899, from the one hotel which took her in: the Windsor Hotel, located at 575 Fifth Avenue.
A Quick Rise to Fame + Notoriety
At the Windsor Hotel, the proprietor, Warren Leland, not only permitted Evangeline’s occupancy, but even appeared interested in her cosmic claims. He asked to have his horoscope read. Startled by what the stars revealed, Evangeline prophesied that she foresaw a terrible calamity.
Amused, but unalarmed, Mr. Leland took no action — though the very next day, his hotel was destroyed by fire. All at once, Mr. Leland lost his wife, his daughter, and his livelihood, and he recounted Evangeline’s prediction to the press. Leland died less than three weeks later, while newspapers clamored for insight from Ms. Evangeline Adams, her fame rising like the Phoenix from the ashes of the Windsor Hotel fire.
Soon, people sought out Evangeline, but there was one overwhelming problem: practicing astrology was illegal. At that time, fortune-telling, palm reading, and astrology were considered “black arts” and were associated with newly arriving immigrant populations. As cops cracked down, Evangeline was arrested for fortune-telling in 1911. Though the charges were dismissed, she gained further publicity as a result. Her second arrest in 1914 would not only change her life, but also change the legality of fortune-telling and astrology forever.
Evangeline Fights Back
The penalty for fortune-telling carried a similar sentence as that of prostitution. If Evangeline could pay the fine, perhaps she could evade imprisonment. Yet, ever rebellious — she was an Aquarius after all — she used this opportunity to buck the system, contesting the case in court.
Evangeline argued that as an astrologer, she was not definitively forecasting what would happen. Rather, she argued, astrology was an “applied science” — it takes established principles as a guide to chart human characteristics, and any assessment is based on mathematical calculations.
Evangeline had one more trick up her sleeve. She’d made her reputation by turning disbelievers into believers, and she would cast this same spell on Judge John H. Freschi.
Evangeline asked Judge Freschi the exact date and time of his son’s birth. Using that information, she gave such a compelling description of the judge’s son that Freschi said: “The defendant raises astrology to the dignity of an exact science.” With the acquittal, Evangeline not only won the court case, but also decriminalized astrology.
Freely able to practice her craft, Evangeline rented out an office space at Carnegie Hall, receiving King Edward VII of Britain, J.P. Morgan, U.S. Senators, executives, and business elites. She became known as “the Wall Street Seer,” and published books and pamphlets while contributing to nationwide newspaper columns. She soon occupied six suites on the 10th floor of Carnegie Hall and hired dozens of employees to answer 4,000 pieces of mail a day. By 1930, she broadcast syndicated primetime radio programs from Carnegie Hall three times a week, reaching thousands of people across the United States.
Evangeline is said to have correctly predicted the stock market crash of 1929 — and in 1931, she foretold that the United States would be at war in 1942. She’d even booked a 21-night lecture tour, but canceled after (correctly) predicting her own death in 1933.
In 30 years, she’d gone from being denied entry to a hotel for practicing astrology, to practicing astrology from Carnegie Hall. In emulation of the night sky which she so charted, she too became a star. If time and space are so tied to fate, then Jersey City opened up the portal to astrology in America.
Delivered on Monday, July 5th, 1852, in Rochester, New York
Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me, quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.
The papers and placards say, that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for it is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall, seems to free me from embarrassment.
The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say, I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.
This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.
Fellow-citizens, I shall not presume to dwell at length on the associations that cluster about this day. The simple story of it is that, 76 years ago, the people of this country were British subjects. The style and title of your “sovereign people” (in which you now glory) was not then born. You were under the British Crown. Your fathers esteemed the English Government as the home government; and England as the fatherland. This home government, you know, although a considerable distance from your home, did, in the exercise of its parental prerogatives, impose upon its colonial children, such restraints, burdens and limitations, as, in its mature judgement, it deemed wise, right and proper.
But, your fathers, who had not adopted the fashionable idea of this day, of the infallibility of government, and the absolute character of its acts, presumed to differ from the home government in respect to the wisdom and the justice of some of those burdens and restraints. They went so far in their excitement as to pronounce the measures of government unjust, unreasonable, and oppressive, and altogether such as ought not to be quietly submitted to. I scarcely need say, fellow-citizens, that my opinion of those measures fully accords with that of your fathers. Such a declaration of agreement on my part would not be worth much to anybody. It would, certainly, prove nothing, as to what part I might have taken, had I lived during the great controversy of 1776. To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on the tyranny of England towards the American Colonies. It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers. But, to proceed.
Feeling themselves harshly and unjustly treated by the home government, your fathers, like men of honesty, and men of spirit, earnestly sought redress. They petitioned and remonstrated; they did so in a decorous, respectful, and loyal manner. Their conduct was wholly unexceptionable. This, however, did not answer the purpose. They saw themselves treated with sovereign indifference, coldness and scorn. Yet they persevered. They were not the men to look back.
As the sheet anchor takes a firmer hold, when the ship is tossed by the storm, so did the cause of your fathers grow stronger, as it breasted the chilling blasts of kingly displeasure. The greatest and best of British statesmen admitted its justice, and the loftiest eloquence of the British Senate came to its support. But, with that blindness which seems to be the unvarying characteristic of tyrants, since Pharaoh and his hosts were drowned in the Red Sea, the British Government persisted in the exactions complained of.
The madness of this course, we believe, is admitted now, even by England; but we fear the lesson is wholly lost on our present rulers.
Oppression makes a wise man mad. Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment. They felt themselves the victims of grievous wrongs, wholly incurable in their colonial capacity. With brave men there is always a remedy for oppression. Just here, the idea of a total separation of the colonies from the crown was born! It was a startling idea, much more so, than we, at this distance of time, regard it. The timid and the prudent (as has been intimated) of that day, were, of course, shocked and alarmed by it.
Such people lived then, had lived before, and will, probably, ever have a place on this planet; and their course, in respect to any great change, (no matter how great the good to be attained, or the wrong to be redressed by it), may be calculated with as much precision as can be the course of the stars. They hate all changes, but silver, gold and copper change! Of this sort of change they are always strongly in favor.
These people were called tories in the days of your fathers; and the appellation, probably, conveyed the same idea that is meant by a more modern, though a somewhat less euphonious term, which we often find in our papers, applied to some of our old politicians.
Their opposition to the then dangerous thought was earnest and powerful; but, amid all their terror and affrighted vociferations against it, the alarming and revolutionary idea moved on, and the country with it.
On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it.
“Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”
Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history — the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.
Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.
From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day — cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.
The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.
The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.
The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too — great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was “settled” that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were “final;” not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.
How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defence. Mark them!
Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.
Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interests nation’s jubilee.
Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.
I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait — perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans, if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.
I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!
THE PRESENT.
My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.
“Trust no future, however pleasant, Let the dead past bury its dead; Act, act in the living present, Heart within, and God overhead.”
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have “Abraham to our father,” when they had long lost Abraham’s faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham’s great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout — “We have Washington to our father.” Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.
“The evil that men do, lives after them, The good is oft’ interred with their bones.”
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”
But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY. I shall see, this day, and its popular characteristics, from the slave’s point of view. Standing, there, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this 4th of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man, (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment. What is this but the acknowledgement that the slave is a moral, intellectual and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write. When you can point to any such laws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, there will I argue with you that the slave is a man!
For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are ploughing, planting and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver and gold; that, while we are reading, writing and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives and children, and, above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian’s God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!
Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and lo offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.
What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.
New Thinking Jul 7, 2025 Edward R. Close, PhD, is author of Transcendental Physics. He is coauthor (with Vernon Neppe) of Reality Begins with Consciousness: A Paradigm Shift That Works. He is also author of a lengthy chapter titled “The Mathematical Unification of Time, Space, Matter, Energy, and Consciousness” in Is Consciousness Primary? edited by Gary Schwartz and Marjorie Woollacott. In this interview, rebooted from 2019, he elaborates on several ostensible paradoxes associated with Einstein’s theories of relativity. The normal laws that we associate with space and time in our daily lives break down. Ironically, while people associate Einstein with relativity, he considered himself a determinist. Close proposes that paradoxes of space and time are resolved once we bring consciousness into the picture. His model includes 3 dimensions of space, 3 dimensions of time, and 3 dimensions of consciousness. He elaborates on his view of higher consciousness. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He currently serves as Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on September 19, 2019)
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