552. Lars Muhl

Posted on June 3, 2020 by Rick Archer

Lars Muhl is a Danish author, mystic, and musician, born in Aarhus, Denmark in 1950.

Already as a 10-year-old, Lars Muhl had experienced glimpses of another reality. The shock following the sudden death of his younger sister, caused painful kundalini-like experiences, giving access to the ethereal worlds and a hypersensitive insight into other people’s pain. This lasted for three years.

A turning point came when Lars was 15 and received a book anonymously in the post. Hazrat Inayat Khan’s ‘Gayan Vadan Nirtan’ became the start of a lifelong esoteric study.

Like Paulo Coelho, Lars was for many years a successful singer/songwriter who, concurrently with his music, studied the world’s religions and esoteric knowledge. Then in 1996, he was struck down by an unexplained illness, which neither doctors nor alternative therapists could diagnose. For three years he lay in bed without being able to move or think straight.

Through a close friend’s intervention, Lars was put in touch with a seer who, via the telephone, brought him back to life. That was the start of a completely new existence and the beginning of that quest he has so grippingly described in his trilogy book ‘The O Manuscript: The Seer, The Magdalene, The Grail’.

Other books:

Movie Lars referred to during the interview: The Gate of Light by Lars Muhl

Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.

Interview recorded May 30, 2020

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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546. Stephen G. Post

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Rick Archer

An opinion leader and public speaker, Stephen G. Post, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1983) is the best-selling lead author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving. He has been quoted in more than 4,000 newspapers and magazines and featured on numerous television shows including The Daily Show. Described by Martin E.P. Seligman in Flourish as one of “the stars of positive psychology,” Post is a leader in research on the benefits of giving and on compassionate care in relation to improved patient outcomes and clinician well-being. He addressed the U.S. Congress on volunteerism and health, receiving the Congressional Certificate of Special Recognition for Outstanding Achievement.

Post was co-recipient (2012) with Edmund D. Pellegrino MD of the Pioneer Medal for Outstanding Leadership in HealthCare from the HealthCare Chaplaincy Network, and the Kama Book Award in Medical Humanities from World Literacy Canada (2008). His book The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease: Ethical Issues from Diagnosis to Dying was designated a “medical classic of the century” by the British Medical Journal (2009), which wrote, “Until this pioneering work was published in 1995 the ethical aspects of one of the most important illnesses of our aging populations were a neglected topic.” Post is a recipient of the Alzheimer’s Association’s national distinguished service award “in recognition of personal and professional outreach to the Alzheimer’s Association Chapters on ethics issues important to people with Alzheimer’s and their families.” In 2021 Post published Dignity for Deeply Forgetful People: How Caregivers Can Meet the Challenges of Alzheimer’s Disease (Hopkins).

Co-Recipient of the 2019 Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society Professionalism Award for development the Professional Identity Formation curriculum of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, Post has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (1988-2008), and at Stony Brook (2008-present), where he is Founding Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics. The Center was selected (2011) for special institutional excellence by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (AMA & AAMC accrediting body), the only humanities and ethics entity in American medical school history to receive this distinction. An elected member of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, and the Royal Society of Medicine, London, Post is the author of 300 articles in journals such as Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Psychosomatic Medicine, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In 2003 Post was invited to join the Founding Fellows of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR), based at Cambridge University. Founded in 2002, ISSR is the world’s preeminent learned society devoted to this intersection, with 200 Fellows from the sciences and humanities. In 2001 he founded the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, so named by philanthropist Sir John Templeton, who selected Post as the Institute’s President. A non-profit 501(c) 3 public charity that investigates kindness, giving, and spirituality, Post has written popularly on this topic in God and Love on Route 80: The Hidden Mystery of Human Connectedness.

Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.

Interview recorded April 18, 2020

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.

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535. Diane Hennacy Powell

Posted on February 4, 2020 by Rick Archer

Diane Hennacy Powell, M.D. is a Johns Hopkins-trained psychiatrist, therapist, neuroscientist, and public speaker. She develops multidisciplinary theories towards understanding psychological anomalies, such as savant skills and verified accounts of spacetime navigation. Her current research focuses on controlled testing of autistic savants and children reported to be telepathic and/or precognitive by their caregivers.

Dr. Powell has been on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, a member of a think tank on human consciousness at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and Director of Research for the John E. Mack Institute. Her investigation into the neurocorrelates of ESP is discussed in her 2008 book The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena, and in Seriously Strange: Thinking Anew about Psychical Experiences.

Dr. Powell is also an expert on PTSD and created the psychiatry program for Survivors of Torture, International in San Diego, California. She was the principal author of IONS The 2007 Shift Report: Evidence of a World Transforming and a contributing author to Beyond Forgiveness: Reflections on Atonement, the 2014 Campus Book of the Year at Indiana University. She is also a participant in the #NeverAlone movement for suicide prevention launched by Deepak Chopra.

Website: drdianehennacy.com

Discussion of this interview in the BatGap Community Facebook Group.

Interview recorded February 1, 2020

Video and audio below. Audio also available as a Podcast.