Caroline Cory is a filmmaker, teacher, and author, who's been able to perceive subtle energy and experience otherworldly encounters. In the first half, she joined Connie Willis (info) to discuss those encounters and her exploration of various parapsychological abilities and consciousness states. Cory described merging with light beings at age five, as if they were all one stream of consciousness. "I was on this side of the veil, and they were on the other side," she said, but it was as though she was linked to the spiritual dimension. The beings, who told her they would be with her throughout her life, use a kind of telepathic code to communicate, she explained.
As depicted in her documentary, Superhuman, she teaches people to read and perform actions while blindfolded-- activities typically requiring sight. Children were particularly adept at picking up these skills, she reported. The technique calls for accessing consciousness in place of the eyes and begins with the filling in of peripheral vision, Cory explained, adding that it can potentially help people who are sight-impaired. She offers online classes in blindfold training, as well as telekinesis, spoon bending, and remote viewing. Spoon bending, she noted, is a way to demonstrate that consciousness and intention can affect the physical world.
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Author and supernatural explorer, A.P. Sylvia, delves into the folklore of the past while providing a window into how people have interpreted the world around them. In the latter half, he shared vampire accounts and folklore, and his research into cases and locations. He outlined how notions of the vampire have evolved over the centuries. Vampiric folklore going back hundreds of years seemed to be rooted in how people fearfully reacted to calamitous situations or diseases. There were cases of vampire panics in places such as Europe and New England.
In such panics, corpses would be exhumed to look for vampiric signs like a lack of decomposition, which might indicate they were rising to attack healthy young people who had fallen ill. In this era before scientific understanding, there were often misinterpretations of the decomposition process, he cited, such as seeing blood around the mouth, or bloated bodies looking like they'd gained weight. Sylvia detailed the Mercy Brown case from the 1890s, in which several members of the Brown family had died of consumption (TB). When the daughter Mercy was exhumed, she was found to have little decay. Believing that she was a vampire stalking them, the family burned her heart and liver. Later, through literature and films, the vampire became a more romantic figure associated with immortality, he added.