Syllabus: Energy Healing & Psychokinesis

Course Outline

This eight week academic course explores the phenomena and scientific evidence for energy healing and psychokinesis. Some theories present these as different expressions of the same phenomena. This proposal will be explored in this course.

Energy healing encompasses many techniques including laying on hands, reiki, qigong, healing touch, esoteric healing, and many, many more. Research on healing includes an observation of the phenomena and measurements of the effectiveness of these techniques on people, animals, plants and other organic matter. What does the scientific evidence indicate related to energy healing?

Psychokinesis, PK, or Mind-Matter-Interaction all describe the same phenomena. Can people affect physical objects with only their thoughts or intentions? This course will explore examples of macro and micro psychokinesis and discuss the scientific research that has been done to understand how these phenomena might work and what psychological factors might cause people to demonstrate PK.

This course will commit 4 weeks to each topic and explore the research and theories that discuss the nature of and evidence for energy healing and PK.

Course Outline

  1. Introduction to PK & Healing

    • Definitions of PK & Energy Healing
    • Origins of PK Testing
    • Origins of Tests for Healing
    • Intentional vs Unintentional PK & Healing
    • DMILS
    • Theoretical Introduction

  2. Macro PK

    • Review definitions
    • Stories of Macro PK activity
    • Levitations
    • Moving objects (Kulagina)
    • Metal Bending (Geller, Houck)
    • Thoughtography (Ted Serios)
    • Modern PK
    • Challenges testing macro PK

  3. Micro PK

    • Review definition (statistical evaluation & machines)
    • Stories of micro PK activity
    • Comparison to chance & Randomness
    • Truly Random vs pseudo-random
    • Dice?
    • Random Event Generators
    • Varying interfaces for RNG
    • Integrating RNGs in other systems
    • Challenges testing micro PK (using machines to gather data; DAT)

  4. Poltergeist & Other PK Phenomena

    • Physical Mediumship
    • What is a poltergeist?
    • Roll & Pratt – Seaford Poltergeist (RSPK)
    • Miami Poltergeist
    • Tina Resch
    • Electronic Poltergeist Disturbances
    • 21st Century Poltergeist
    • Testing spontaneous PK activity (physiology; EEG; evoking activity; calming activity)

  5. DMILS & Energies of the body

    • Distant mental influence
    • Mesmerism
    • Vasiliev to staring at goats
    • Bernard Grad & Plant Effects
    • Mouse Ether
    • Nervous System & EEG
    • Heat & Biophotons
    • Auras & Chakras
    • Chi & Meridians

  6. Healing Types, Approaches, and Methods: Is Energy Healing all the same?

    • - Defining Healing
    • Types: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual
    • Approaches: Directed, Holistic, Intentional, Spontaneous, local, nonlocal
    • Methods: Mother’s Touch, Reiki, Healing Touch, Laying Hands, Prayer, Esoteric, Quigong, Bengston’s Hands-on-Healing, Spontaneous Healing, Self-Healing
    • Healing and body energies (how some methods use energies)
    • Healing and other bodies (Emotional, Spiritual, Astral)
    • Is Healing PK?

  7. Testing Energy Healers & Detecting Energies in the Body

    • Approaches to testing
    • Measure Effect: Grad, Mouse Ether, Lettuce Seeds, Prayer Studies
    • Record Experience: Experience of healers, Experience of patient, Approach to Healing
    • Detect Mechanism: Physiology, EEG, Electrical, Magnetic, Light
    • Shielding for energies to determine nature of energies
    • Field Effects vs nonlocal effects

  8. Theoretical Approaches

    • Energy Theory of PK
    • Field Theory of PK
    • Nonlocal Theory
    • DAT Evaluation of PK
    • Healing is PK
    • Healing is not homogeneous
    • PMIR: PK is a result of psi connections

Course Materials

Suggested Readings:

Mind Over Matter by Loyd Auerbach
The PK Zone by Pamela Rae Heath
Experiments in Mental Suggestion by L.L. Vasiliev

Various articles and other media provided by the instructor through the courseroom.

Course Activities

  • Students will be expected to view the class broadcasts or the recordings of the classes each week.
  • Students will be expected to participate in weekly discussion forums and activities. Each student will be expected to provide an original posting each week and to respond to at least one other student in the discussion forums. Greater participation in this area will be considered during class evaluations.
  • One multiple choice or short answer evaluations will be assigned after the 4th or 5th week of class.
  • Students will choose an academic study related to energy healing or macro/micro psychokinesis, summarize the study, and discuss the significance of this study to parapsychology. The summary should include a justification for selecting this study, a review of the research methods used in the study, and original thoughts on how the study could be improved or changed to learn more about the phenomena. This will be a 3 – 6 page paper due at the end of the course.

Evaluations and Grading

Students who are taking the course for a grade will be assessed using a letter grade based on the standard letter grade format.

A – 90 - 100

B – 80 – 89

C – 70 – 79

D – 60 – 69

F – Below 60

Participation in the forums is a large component of the grading, and substantive postings are necessary to get full credit for each discussion topic.

The following activities will be considered to contribute to the courses as follows:

Discussions (Total 40%)

-       Week 1-2 (10%)

-       Week 3-4 (10%)

-       Week 5-6 (10%)

-       Week 7-8 (10%)

Assessment #1 (30%)

Research Summary (30%)