February 2017 - Richmond IONS

Central VA IONs Community Group Program Title:

“Exopolitics in the 21st Century and Beyond.”

Exopolitics is a relatively new term referring to our relationship to those outside our planet, that is, to extraterrestrials (“ETs”). It is formally defined by the Exopolitics Institute as “…an interdisciplinary scientific field, with its roots in the political sciences, that focuses on research, education and public policy with regard to the actors, institutions and processes associated with extraterrestrial life, as well as the wide range of implications this entails through public advocacy and newly emerging paradigms.”

Robert has studied exopolitics extensively for more than a decade, attended conferences and participated in study groups on the topic. He also has interviewed experiencers and contactees, and discovered a treasure trove of little known information he will share at this meeting.

His in-depth study of this subject has opened a window of insights into a broad spectrum of human concerns and aspirations, including noetics.

Robert will explore questions such as: Are we alone? What is the evidence we are not? Who is visiting us and how long have they been visiting? What are or have they been doing? What do they want? What are they like? What can exopolitics teach us about human history, identity and potential?

Does our government have dealings and/or agreements with ETs? Why does our government not tell us about it? What is the U.S. doing in space that they are not telling us about? Are ETs involved in our current global power structure? How reliable is information on exopolitics? What are we learning from ETs and how can we make personal contact with them? What is the outlook for the future? How can I learn more about this?

These questions and more will be addressed, and this is one program you won’t want to miss if you ever spent a moment wondering about these subjects.

About Our Central VA Ions Community Group February Presenter:

Robert Bushman is a long-standing member of IONS, and has served as the IONS community group coordinator in both Alexandria, Virginia and Eugene, Oregon. As a scientific linguist, he was a visiting professor of linguistics, a supervising linguist in a corporate translation office.

He was also a supervisor of a university language instructional program and a developer of commercial language training materials. In addition, he developed the first course in Estonian for the language school of the US State Department. He has been retired since 2003.

Richmond Ions January Meeting Featuring Edward F. Kelly, Ph.D.

Where: River Road Church – Baptist, 8000 River Road (NW corner of River and Ridge Roads)

When: Saturday, January 21, 2017, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, followed by potluck lunch at conclusion of program.

Richmond IONS Program Title:

“Parapsychology in Context – Towards a Personal Reconciliation of Science and Spirit.”

Our 21st Anniversary Program, on January 21, 2017, will feature a talk by Edward F. Kelly, Ph.D., author of numerous scholarly works and Senior Professor of Research at the UVA Medical School’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) in Charlottesville.

The so-called “mind-body” problem (whether mind begets body or body begets mind) has been the core dilemma of Western philosophical discourse for nearly 2,500 years, since the era of Plato and Aristotle.

Through the centuries the pendulum has swung in both directions, and the current drift of establishment science tilts the scales heavily towards a materialistic perspective, leaving little room for spirituality. The mission of IONS Founder, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, was to reconcile these seemingly divergent streams, and Dr. Edward Kelly’s career spanning nearly five decades has been similarly focused.

Ed will speak about his experiences and what he has learned during his 45 years of professional research in the parapsychology field, which started in experimental parapsychology with J.B. Rhine in Durham at Duke University in 1972, through his current role at UVA with a research group focused mainly on evidence for postmortem survival.

He will describe in personal terms what has emerged for him as the meaning of it all based on his experiences, and how his experiences have transformed him from something pretty close to conventional physicalism/scientific materialism in his early years towards a vision which puts consciousness at the heart of all, essentially inverting the mainstream conception of mind as secondary to matter. We are very pleased to welcome Ed as our 21st Anniversary guest speaker.

About Our Richmond Ions January Presenter:

Edward F. Kelly, Ph.D. is currently Professor of Research in the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia Medical School. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics and cognitive science from Harvard in 1971, and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in parapsychology, initially at J.B. Rhine’s Institute for Parapsychology, then for ten years through the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke, and finally through a private research institute in Chapel Hill.

Between 1988 and 2002 he worked with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill, mainly carrying at EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author (with his wife, Emily Williams Kelly, Ph.D., as a co-author) of Irreducible Mind (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and Beyond Physicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

He is now returning to his central long-term research interest – application of modern functional neuroimaging methods to intensive
psychophysiological studies of psi and ASCs in exceptional subjects (http:cedaracreekinst.org).

Month: February 2017

Central VA IONS Community Group Meeting February 18, 2017